Trial of the Art: Over the Halfway Point of Linktober!

Week two of Linktober was filled with ups and downs. I suppose fatigue began to set in, so that was the major hurdle I had to overcome. I left off last Sunday only having the next day’s sketch ready, although Monday evening I felt compelled not to leave the piece at only the sketch phase, and went on to ink it. That was the critical point of the week: the choice was maintaining the cushion of one day (so if I ever didn’t have the time to finish a piece, I could afford not doing it without falling behind), or have a really awesome inked Mazura piece.

Day 11: Horse/Mount

This is a further progression of my line weight experimentation. With this piece I picked an area where a light source would be and then inked accordingly. The thicker lines are in shadow, the thinner lines are in the light. I also incorporated some hatching and cross-hatching to create value.

Day 12: Night

I felt like whatever I did for this prompt, it would need color. I ended up doing a landscape painting of the Akkala region in an impressionist style. Krita has an oil paint filter that I utilized it for this, I could be wrong, but I didn’t notice a difference between how it looked with the filter off and when I had it on. Either way, I enjoyed painting this.

Day 13: NPC

I had a hard time deciding on an NPC to choose from, other than I knew I’d ultimately pick an NPC from Majora’s Mask because it has the best cast of NPCs. While my mind was sifting through the game’s characters, I was suddenly reminded of Mikau playing his fish guitar and yelling, “Baby!” I had to draw him!

Day 14: Inventory

I never really spend too long having no idea what to do for a piece, until this day. I woke up and had no inspiration, I went to work, and still nothing was popping out to me. When I got home from work I had a spark hit: what if I did the Mask screen from Majora’s Mask! I started sketching… and nothing was coming together like I wanted. My Postman’s Hat looked bad, the All Night’s Mask was really wonky, the Bomb Mask looked ok just because it’s pretty simple, and the same is true of the Stone’s Mask. The Great Fairy’s Mask I sketched looked so horrendous I decided to scrap the idea all together.

That was about 20 minutes wasted. It’s been said hindsight is 20/20, I definitely feel that way now about my approach to this. I was trying to sketch the masks really small and zoom in to add details. I think for most artists this is the case, I’ve found it is certainly true for me: drawing medium or large sized things is easier. Maybe it’s because there is more space to work with, but when I’m not drawing things really small, I create better artwork. I should have made layers for every mask so I could draw larger versions of them, and then used the transform tool to make them smaller. From there I could move them into the order I wanted.

I really enjoyed my second idea though. I loaded up Breath of the Wild and went to fight the Coliseum Lynel to get a good screenshot of the game’s quick menu to use for reference. There is still more I could do with this piece, but it’ll be awhile before I finish it up.

Day 15: Korok

A pretty easy day, I decided not to go too complex, simplicity can be good afterall. Makar is maybe my favorite Korok, I’m hard pressed to think of another Korok I like as well as him. Coloring him also went pretty fast.

Day 16: Redesign Zelda’s Outfit

I have a a plan for a Vampire themed Ganondorf redesign for the Shadow Calendar. To accompany that, I decided to do a Vampire Zelda redesign. I gave her a sort of Gothic Dress, and I felt visually an inverted Triforce would work well.

Day 17: Fairy

Much like Korok day, I decided not to do anything too crazy for today’s theme. I picked Tatl and Tael, coloring the piece went really fast, so I also added some luminosity blending to the color which created a pretty cool look.

Second Week Takeaway

My view on using the tablet has probably improved even more. At times when I’m inking I’ve found that it really does feel like I’m using an ink pen on a piece of paper, and that’s really cool. Painting is still an adjustment for me compared to traditional means. Using a color wheel is pretty different from mixing your own colors, and all the brush techniques I’ve learned don’t really translate over, or at least I haven’t found a way to make them work.

It turns out the slight lag of the pen input was just from me using the weighted line setting instead of the normal setting. I prefer leaving weighted on because I don’t like the slightly pixelated edges of the normal lines. The other issues I was having with the eraser setting messing up and the pen pressure getting out of sorts is apparently not uncommon for graphic tablets in general, even with more expensive ones. I suppose it’s a bit of a relief that this isn’t something exclusive to my tablet. A huge thanks to my friend who told me all of this, he also gave me a few tips on how to solve the issue. Resetting the computer like I was doing can work, otherwise resetting the tablet driver will definitely remedy the problem.

I only had one new issue happen this week. For Day 14 I decided on a whim to try recording my screen using the Xbox Game Bar, but it caused really bad lag in Krita. Unless I can figure out a way to reduce that lag, it looks like recording is off the table for now. It sucks because video content that is sped up is something I like to see, and it’d be cool of I could make clips like that of my own artwork.

Posting my art on Twitter has been cool, but I still have no idea what I’m even doing. I’ve read stuff about posting at specific times of the day on certain days gets your tweets to a larger audience. Ok, I can buy that. What’s the deal with hashtags though? Which is better, using only 1 or 2, or more? Twitter claims using only 1 or 2 is the sweet spot, anything more will actually mess up your tweet’s impressions. I have no idea if this is true or not, I use 4 or 5 hashtags usually; am I shooting myself in the foot by doing that?

To wrap things up, I’m happy that every piece this week was either inked, colored, or both. In that regard, I’d say this week turned out better than last week. It all goes back to choosing to ink Mazura: every day thereafter I was making the prompts with a deadline, and it made me get very critical of what was going to work for a piece, and what definitely wouldn’t. It felt like this week took a lot out of me, sure, but it was worth it. I made art that excited me each day, and that was what pushed me through the fatigue. There were some days I wanted to do other things, like play a video game for the evening, watch an anime, or to just be lazy, but doing that would have swallowed the time I need to make a piece that looks decent. It has also been a good mental boost that I’m now over the halfway point!

Looking forward, tomorrow’s piece is in progress, the Redesign Ganondorf’s Outfit prompt for the Shadow Calendar is also tomorrow, so I need to begin work on that. I also can’t wait until I get to the Snake/Serpent/Dragon prompt!

For more of my artwork as I post them daily check out my Twitter! I also recently made an Instagram that I plan to start posting to, and a DeviantArt!

Charles is a Senior Editor at Zelda Dungeon. He is a massive fan of Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Marvel Comics. He enjoys Skittles immensely. Follow him on Twitter to see all of his latest artwork throughout Linktober and the rest of the year!