Fan Art Week
Hello DeviantArt! I’m long-time member Ranefea, or Ran, and lately I’ve become known for my stained glass style artworks, especially my The Legend of Zelda oriented fanart pieces.
For those unfamiliar, The Legend of Zelda is a long running action-adventure RPG video game series by Nintendo. Throughout its 30+ year run, this game series has seen many different visual styles, from anime, to cartoon, to cute-simplicity. The mid-2000’s brought us The Wind Waker, a Game Cube-era game that introduced what’s now known as the “toon” style for the series. This game and style also brought us some amazing stained glass style official artwork.
A few years ago, I began experimenting with drawing in this toon style, working to perfectly mimic the art from the games as an exercise. What started with a few fun pieces evolved into a full series of artwork where I took the non-toon style games and drew them in this stained glass toon style.
The following tutorial will walk you through my process in creating these works mostly using my Link’s Awakening artwork.
Tools
My main tool for creating these pieces is Adobe Photoshop. While I’m mostly a traditional artist these days, my stained glass pieces are some of the few done start to finish completely digitally. Photoshop is usually my digital tool of choice and I’ve been using it for over 15 years. While I’ve tried other software, Photoshop offers the best tools for creating these pieces specifically. But don’t let this stop you from trying these methods in other software!
Step 1. Visualization and Research
The first step is to visualize what I want to do with the piece at hand. In this case, we’re looking at the game Link’s Awakening. I’ll look at existing artwork in the toon style I’m working in as well as artwork from the game itself. This helps me re-immerse myself into the game and consider poses and other elements.
I also consider the visual elements from this game. What were the main themes, characters, landmarks, etc.? What can I incorporate into this piece that will be unmistakably recognized as being from this game?
For this piece, I chose the elements of the Wind Fish’s egg, sitting high on the mountain, and common elements from the series as a whole: the rupee and the heart. For other pieces, it may be characters unique to that game, such as Hilda in A Link Between Worlds, in which case I mirrored her and Zelda, as they are counterparts to each other.
Step 2. Sketching
When creating a stained glass piece, one of the first things I do is create the “frame” for the piece. For these Zelda pieces, I reuse the same frame to keep a common element throughout the whole series.
The next thing I do is sketch out Link, who will always be the main focus of each piece and will always be positioned horizontally center as he is in the official artwork. I work out a pose appropriate to the game and mimic The Wind Waker's style, while carefully considering the other stylistic elements from this game’s version of link such as his hair style, tunic, boots, etc. working to retain these features.
Next up are the main background elements. I don’t actually sketch out every tiny detail in most cases, just the main pieces as I’m mostly working on composition. The Wind Fish’s egg is a great element—the egg shape is symmetrical and works well positioned behind Link’s head like a contrasting halo which is so common in historical stained glass. While the mountain it sits on doesn’t actually float in the game, this is where we can take some artistic liberties.
Since Link’s Awakening takes place on an island, and starts out and ends with Link in the ocean, water is another element important to add.
Step 3. Line art
Once the rough sketch is completed I begin working on the line art. The line art for a piece like this would be the equivalent to what is called “came” in stained glass—the metal structures binding the pieces of glass together.
I start with Link, using thick black lines, however it’s important to vary line weights. Main lines will be thicker, detail lines will be thinner. Intersecting lines are rounded out in the corners to mimic the merging came.
On a new layer, I create a thicker outside border. This is important as it helps prevent Link from blending into the background too much.
The background line art is completed on a separate layer. I draw out the main elements first. But then what do we do with all this blank space still left? Honestly, this is where I play around with shapes and lines until something comes together that I like! Feel free to experiment and play! Once I have something I like, I follow the same as I did above with line weights and such.
Step 4. Colors
The colors for Link are easy enough—matching his colors to his in-game colors.
The background colors are a little trickier. Outside of specific elements that have set colors, here I think about what colors this game makes me think of, or what colors are heavily present in the game itself. I'll then fill the whole background with the main color, usually a gradient between hues. I select various sections and use the hue/saturation/lightness sliders to alter the color, further making each piece like an individual fragment of stained glass.
Step 5. Textures and Blending Modes
A lot of stained glass isn’t one smooth color—it has a bit of a texture to it. Here I select many different sections and then copy the color to a new layer. I use various filters (noises, blurs) to create a texture, then change the blending mode on that layer. Which blending mode used will depend on the colors selected as the blending reacts differently with different values and hues. The desired result is a bright, vibrant look. Continue doing this until all pieces have been textured. In Photoshop, you can create actions—where you record a few steps that you plan on using over and over—to help speed up the process. Make sure you don’t select pieces next to each other as when you blur the textures, the colors can spill into each other (but sometimes this creates a nice effect).
Step 6. Final Detailing
Back to Link. Here I select different sections and use a lighter color to create a highlight. Just scribbling on the color in the center and adding a Gaussian blur and setting the highlight layer to “overlay” gives a bright effect like light shining through.
I also duplicate the line art several times and add various blurs and blending modes (again the blending mode can vary depending on the colors used). This softens the line art a bit and can give a bit of a shaded look where the light might not be shining through as much at the edge of the came.
Here is the completed piece!
And that's about it! Feel free to add whatever other elements or detailing you want for your own piece—not every one will require the same thing and it's always a great learning experience to play around with effects.