Missing BotW Concept Art of Link's Family from Master Works

I'm still catching up on stuff I forgot to post to blogger that I was posting on Bluesky.

Find the 2400dpi scans of the full pages here.

Find these 2 pieces of art here, cleaned art of "Link's Family," and here, cleaned art of "Link and a cape-clad girl, possibly his sister."

In the Japanese artbook for Breath of the Wild, Master Works, there's art on the back pages of the book that doesn't appear on the English version. Two of the more prominent sketches are this first one, labeled "Family" and then the one below it that appears to show the same girl. Or the same concept of there being a girl possibly being something like Link's sister. These pieces were posted online before, in fact that's how I realized they were in one book but not the other, but I wanted to make higher res scans and then also edit the levels so the yellow was less distracting. These aren't the only missing pieces, there's a bunch of other cool little sketches on those pages, unfortunately most are covered by other images or had a blur applied to them. 

2400dpi Scans of 2018 Zelda Concert Folders and Art

This art was done for Zelda Concert promotion and it is stunning. It features Skyward Sword Zelda, Ocarina of Time Link, and Breath of the Wild Link, all in the Breath of the Wild style.

Find the 2400dpi scans here.

Sadly the only digital versions of these that I can find are pretty small so a while ago Ikhana, the collector, was kind enough to make great scans from her own collection and send them to me. I don't always do this, but since I liked them so much, I decided I would try to get them and make even higher quality ones. I have since been able to piece the set together with more affordable auctions. 

 

1992 Link meets 2022 Link

I posted this on Twitter and it really took off so I figured I might as well catalog it here. This great little illustration comes from the Futabasha Fantasy Novel Series: Legend of Zelda, Count of the Black Shadow 1992, by Akio Higuchi. The cover illustration is accredited to Fujiwara Kamui but I don't know if they did the inside illustrations as well because there is no one specifically credited for them. ISBN4-575-23096-0 It's a 254 page novel with about 14 incredible illustrations. I'll scan the whole thing soon but for now you can find the old illustration scans and info here and the nicer illustration scans are in the LttP art gallery, here. 

Someone wondered if this was real and it was neat to be able to point out it was on my site all the way back in 2004. The reason people haven't seen much of this stuff, even though it's been online for around 17 years, (I somewhat sarcastically, then sincerely, spoke about this in one of my last posts,) is that I had problems where larger sites and forums wouldn't link to my site because supplemental material at the time, at least that wasn't mass consumed in the US like the Valiant Comics, wasn't considered "real Zelda content." People would get chased off if they wanted to post/talk about even just for fun. Which was just so strange to me! Because I can assure you: you can still enjoy the core games without being angry that other stuff was created for the series. It's so much more fun if everyone is just enjoying what inspires them to love the series even more! It honestly helps give it life in the years between games.

One of my friends, linksliltri4ce, also reminded me that A Link to the Past also had the concept of floating islands with temples on them. (Not in game, but in the backstory and manual art.) Which I knew but it never really clicked when it came to how much fun it is to play around with the idea of connecting Breath of the Wild 2 with aLttP. Some of the ruins with pillars on hills in BotW are around the same type of ancient Greek-pillar as Ganon's Tower in LttP, which is in the Sacred Realm too. Anyway, that's all super loose but it's fun thoughts for fan artists and people who like to play with ideas!

Breath of the Wild art is coming next

I'm getting closer to finishing up the bulk of the Skyward Sword section of the official art gallery, so out of curiosity I did some test cleaning for the Breath of the Wild artbook, Creating a Champion. It turned out pretty well. Looking forward to adding nice concept sketches to the gallery. Here are some examples with very minimal manual cleaning (basically I mean none of the original art was altered or lost)