Trial of the Art: The Year of the Rito, and the Master Sword Goes Viral!

Week 3 of Linktober has been very eventful! I got behind a day, made a pretty big mistake on a piece, and then fixed that mistake for it to proceed to go viral on Twitter! Let’s take a look at the art!

Day 18: Fairy

I didn’t want to do anything too fancy for this piece. From sketch to ink it took merely 10 minutes, so I took some extra time to apply color and some blending to get the effect in the finished piece.

Day 19: Sheikah

Every monk in Breath of the Wild has something unique about them, whether it is their pose, hand gesture, or apparel. The monks on the Great Plateau, however, have a common theme of hand gestures that represent the Triforce. I picked Owa Daim from the Statis Trial to draw. This took longer than the previous piece to make, but not too much time, from sketch to ink I spent about an hour on it.

Day 20: Link

I decided for this day to draw Ocarina of Time Link. I don’t think the piece is bad, it just didn’t turn out the way I wanted. The face resembles Ocarina of Time Link to me, but only barely. To be honest, it annoys me that I had trouble executing this one. Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask are my favorite Zelda games, and the Hero of Time is maybe my favorite Link. At least this has given me a goal though, I will draw the Hero of Time more until I feel satisfied with the result!

Day 21: Master Sword

You might have seen this one on Twitter. It is by far my most popular tweet to date. But before it became what it is now, I had a huge problem happen to it. The sketch phase went smoothly, I moved on to inking and that was feeling like a breeze, but then I got carried away and merged the ink layer with the sketch layer. By the time I noticed it, I had already added so much that I couldn’t undo far enough back to unmerge the layers.

This is where I find traditional a lot more simple than digital. With traditional media you can just ink over your pencil lines, and once the ink is dry, erase away any remaining pencil marks without compromising the inked lines. With digital, if the sketch and ink lines are on the same layer erasing away any stray pencil marks is a challenge. You can very easily mess up the inked lines if you aren’t careful, and the whole polishing process will be time consuming. 

It probably would have taken me 30 minutes to an hour to fix the piece that way. What I did instead was the result of a lot of messing around. First I tried using the magic wand tool to select an area and erase the pencil markings away that were inside, although this didn’t pan out for me. The next step was using the color fill tool instead. It got rid of the excess pencil lines, but also caused some of my ink lines to slightly change color, no longer being black, instead something akin to a really dark blue that was nearly black. The final step was using the split layer feature, getting rid of the layers I didn’t want, and changing the hue/brightness of the remaining lines to get them cohesive again.

The final touch was painting the background, which I feel really makes the piece pop! 

Day 22: Snake/Serpent/Dragon

I was anticipating this one for a while. Volvagia is the only dragon I wanted to do. Knowing what to draw is only half the battle sometimes: figuring out what pose to go for can be a challenge too. I went with Volvagia coming up from the lava, and after a suggestion from a friend went with a foreshortening look for his left arm to make it appear to be reaching out.

Day 23: Champion/s

I already drew Teba earlier in the month, I also drew Koboli last week, Revali felt fitting. I am calling this the year of the Rito for me! I picked the pose in the piece because in my Master Mode playthrough of Breath of the Wild I decided to take screenshots of each Champion giving away their Champion ability. For some reason that was just a goal I set for myself. Each one is perhaps among my favorite pictures on my Switch, so no matter which Champion I picked I probably would have drawn them in that pose.

Day 24: Forest

I did a speed painted for today’s piece because I had a pretty busy day. For something I did in less than an hour, I think it turned out pretty well. I did enjoy making this, but I feel like there could have been other forest areas in the series that I would have liked to have painted as well.

Third Week Takeaway

This week didn’t feel as hard as the previous one; maybe because I know there are only a handful of days left. I fell behind on Day 21, but I finished it after work on the 22nd and still managed to create an inked Volvagia that I was very satisfied with.

As for how the tablet is holding up, I have noticed a small dot on the screen that I originally thought was a stray particle, but closer examination makes me think it is a small scratch in the screen. I have absolutely no idea how it got there, so its sudden appearance is strange. When I pass the tablet pen over that area it still works perfectly fine, however it feels annoying when I pass the pen over it. I do worry about the scratch getting deeper, and whether other ones might randomly pop up in the future. There is actually a protective film specifically designed for the tablet I have on XP-Pen’s website, I think that is a definite future purchase from me for that extra piece of mind.

Having a tweet go viral was an exciting experience for sure. Right now it feels more like an anomaly though than something that could happen more frequently to me. All those things I was questioning last week are still on the forefront of my mind, specifically while analyzing the tweet of my Master Sword art. What exactly was it that made it explode the way it did, besides looking cool (I feel like it isn’t the only art I’ve done all month that looks cool)? Was it the time of day I posted, or the hashtags I used? It got retweeted by the Zelda Dungeon account, so I suspect that played a big part. Although I was laying in bed when all of this happened, so I’m unsure if the retweet was the catalyst for it gaining traction, or if it had already started to gain traction and the retweet came as a result of that.

In other news, one of the things I find that I am missing is playing Chess. Doing Linktober makes it hard for me to spare time to play a game with classical time controls. Playing Rapid games could be feasible, but I never feel like I am actually improving by playing with limited time. I am definitely looking forward to playing some more once this month is over!

To bring this to a close, I do have an idea in mind for tomorrow’s prompt that I have been thinking about since last week, and I know what I want to do for the final day’s Free for All prompt. Just 7 more days!

For more of my artwork as I post them daily check out my Twitter! I also recently made an Instagram, 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!