I had a hectic morning so I didn't have time post until now.
Since OoT was my first Zelda I wanted to redo my Master Sword piece from last year that was based off pulling the sword in OoT. I hated that piece by time I was finished with it because it gave me so many issues.
I wanted to animate it because my original vision was moving blue lights and a shine moving across the sword hilt, but at the time I had no clue on where to even start. So that ambition was immedietly shot down.
Then I struggled to get the Master Sword to look decent, it's not an easy sword to draw at all. Then at some point when I was already well into the inking stage I noticed my sketch layer was merged with the ink layer, which wasn't what I wanted at all. I was so done by the end of the day, and that was also around the time I accidentely broke my tablet's pen, so it felt like the universe was telling me to just give up. I remember going into the linktober server like, I don't think I can complete Linktober this year after getting so close, and it was really emotional to me because my only goal was to just finish, I didn't have to make every piece look spectacular, if I could just finish it would be enough.
There are a few key people who talked me on that terrible week that convinced me to not give up, and I will always remember this and be grateful. Firstly, everyone here on ZD because the night my tablet pen broke I wrote about it here either in the SB or in one of the General Discussion threads, all the support here was great.
@Dr. Fraxenstein made me all excited about putting a bandaid on the pen like the pencil in the doodlebob episode of Spongebob if it still worked. Status on doodlebob pencil, still works, I still have it in the fancy box the replacement pen came in, and I still like using it because of the bandaid, lol
drive.google.com
@Pen Talked to me on discord, and that also helped a lot, he made me feel less bad about breaking the pen when I was still very heated over it. Gotta talk to Pen about the pen, lol.
These are names some of you might not know. Mimimaru is the artist I talked to the most every day throughout Linktober last year, she always gave me so much support, encouragement, and when I needed it, advice, and her advice was invaluable on the day I merged the layers of the Master Sword piece. Also Blanchedraws, the day my tablet pen broke she was hyping me up on just doing pencil sketches to finish out the month, lol.
I went on to finish the Master Sword prompt, but it took me an extra day, and I posted it so late at night on social media I was like, "there is no chance anyone will see this, today is a throw away for posting online". By some weird twist of fate, that tweet became my most popular post on any social media platform, lol.
Coming full circle a year later, I know how to animate now, I'm still only scratching the surface on how to animate, but I was at least able to nail the original vision I had with what little knowledge of animation I have now. I think this is an improvement over the original and I can finally be happy that I did what I wanted to a year ago.