The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary

Don't know what's making me so incredibly nostalgic these days. Or somehow all these marketing 'anniversarys' coincide with my demographic. Curse them.

Anyway, this piece was done for CGHub's 2D Jam of Zelda's anniversary. The Dark World in 'Link to the Past' was the thing that jumped into my brain. Probably because I spent so long there running around not realising it actually had some relationship to the Light World. I'm reminiscing here and probably not making sense to anybody out there.

I tried to change up my workflow for this one. Colour palette was derived from a Richard Schmid painting that had a similar mood to what I wanted. I 'mosaiced' the image in Photoshop and mixed from there. It's NOT a Nori original idea - I read it somewhere in a magazine and thought I'd give it a shot. It's nice if you need to paint a feeling out there and remain gestural. The rest is drawing, really. However, now that I look at it, you can lose something using that technique and I probably wouldn't use it if I were going for a finished painting?

The other thing I tried to do was stay with a singular hard edge brush in Painter and work from large to small. That way I concentrated on the graphic shapes and how they worked in the overall composition. Bit of a puzzle, and still a challenge.

And here is the theme that sent shivers down my spine when I began working on this.