New High Res Scans: Link's Awakening Dreamer Artbook

The out of print 2019 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening had a 120 page bonus artbook that I've finally fully scanned in high resolution at 600dpi. It mainly contains some really adorable concept art with my favorite piece being the Oracle style character sheet and sketches of Link. I believe the US version is hardback, pictured here, but I purchased and scanned the Japanese version because it's a lot cheaper to obtain and, being softcover, I felt less guilty about removing the pages to get perfectly flat images. 

You can find all of the pages at the flickr gallery here.

Also, apologies, I realized that my scanner is scanning slightly crooked. It doesn't affect the images quality it just means that the pages aren't perfectly horizontal. Looks like I need a new scanner. 

The Skyward Sword Official Art Gallery Collection is Massive- And Still Growing!

The official art gallery for Skyward Sword isn't even finished but it's already massive. Please check it out over on flickr! I'm pretty proud of it so far. I still have a ton left to do though before the re-release: I'm currently scanning and editing maps to add as well as being nearly done locating and organizing item renders and the art for the game sprites.

In it you'll find the official game release illustrations, posters, hundreds of pieces of concept art, renders and rips that will help with character reference, and let me know if you want me to add level renders or anything else. 

Years ago I made scans of the artbooks and lightly cleaned up a lot of the images. Those are the ones you'll most likely find on wiki galleries and reposted on pages. I just re-did all of that with clearer and more vibrant versions and they're in the gallery now: so they're really worth seeing and using. once again I worked on taking the distracting text off of most of them too so they're really nice to look at and study and even better to use for illustrating articles.

Backstory: If you don't know, I'm currently working on creating the most extensive and complete official art collection for every Legend of Zelda game and am trying hard to make and track down the best versions of every piece of art out there. Exactly 19 years ago tomorrow is when the site first launched and keeping official art from being hard to locate, or disappearing completely, is why I started History of Hyrule. I'm excited to be working towards this goal again... and it's even more fun knowing the task will never end. There will always be something new or left to find.

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)

 

Insanely High-Rez Old-School Link Art

This has always been one of my favorite pieces of Link art and thanks to the incredible collector, Art of Nintendo Power on Twitter, we have a high resolution scan of the actual cel. That's right: it's a cel, he owns it now, he scanned it at 1200dpi, and since it's a painting there's no pixilation. It's incredible and I am in heaven. I did a rough clean up job on it and have it uploaded at the flickr gallery in its all its 17,680 x 9900 glory, here.

You could originally see this in Nintendo's Legend of Zelda Tips and Tactics guide, and I use to be responsible for the best image of it online, which is a joke compared to this one. I'm super happy to pass that torch because, seriously, nothing beats this!

Gallery Update: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons mostly done!

Super excited about this one because it's really cute and harder than it should have been, mainly because so much of the sprite art seemed impossible to track down! Anyway, I can easily say, this is the most complete Oracles art gallery online, nothing was even close to being in one place. And a head's up: many of the scenes are animated gifs, if you download them you'll be able to see them.

Check it out on Flickr!

Gallery Update: Official Art for Majora's Mask mostly complete!

Here's the most complete The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask character, poster, and concept art gallery ever online. Find it here! I just have item art left to do and I will also probably come back and add a single render for each character and enemy, for reference, as well as a few more pieces of Himekawa art, 4koma art, and I may redo some of the Hyrule Histora images. Most of all: Let me know if I'm missing anything.

I also did some re-draws over these characters, that had other characters overlaid on them, so that people could have them as single images for character sheets and the like. I need to redo Romani's hair though. It was 1am when I did that and I'm not happy with it. You'll find high resolution images for them in the gallery

Gallery Update: Ocarina of Time Gallery mostly complete!

I've been bad about updating here and I'm making an effort to change that starting now since I'm seeing how much the backlog piles up. Lots up updates are getting posted today. 

Oot! This is, by far, the most complete & highest-rez official art gallery for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time ever online. I spent so much time tracking down the highest quality images & cleaning up saves and scans. Find it here! I have a few maps from the Versus guide left to add, and I will probably come back and add a single render for each character and enemy, for reference, as well as a few more pieces of Himekawa art, 4koma art, sage symbols, and I may redo some of the Hyrule Histora images. Most of all: Let me know if I'm missing anything.

A note: While most of the official art gallery borrows heavily from the incredible work people have done archiving things on Wiki's, they can still be quite hard to navigate and the sections aren't always interconnected. Like Impa art may only be under a small sub directory of Impa, not in the gallery for the character or a game. It can still be pretty hard to track down an image on them even when you know what you are looking for. Some of these images don't even come up on reverse searches even though they've been uploaded for ages. I also do as much work as I can myself, (and many of these same wiki's have used hundreds of my guide and book scans for the past 20 years, I really do try not to take from places that haven't benefited from my work as well) but we all have access to different things so it really is a joint project, preserving this stuff for people to find and people look for things in different ways. Wikis are incredible for information and holding on to art anyone can add but the point of the gallery on History of Hyrule site is a little different. It's purely easy-access image archival, so people can have quick viewing access to find what they need for their project and to learn what is out there. I am also trying to encourage back traffic back to the wikis if people want transparent PNGs.

Super Rare Link to the Past Manga: Never Posted Online Before

 Ah, AH! I am so in love with how this happens. So if you saw the last post you'd know MiloScat wrote me about 3 old school Zelda mangas that have never even been online before. I really love them all but, what I am so incredibly in love with, is the fact that people are still finding and getting this stuff online exactly so it's never lost.

 
He sent me this LttP one from scans he made from the volume he located and is allowing me to host them on the site. (I'll get them added to the site-proper soon, right now they're in the flickr gallery.) He may even translate them eventually. I cleaned them up a bit and am so happy to be able share them here. It's a 39 page Link to the Past manga by Toshihiro Ono that he believes is a stand-alone work. That can seem a little confusing because it introduces itself in the middle of the game, and appears to have established characters, but the context of the text in the rest of the magazine implies it. Apparently, according to an interview, this was this guy's first published manga too! I think Link looks great in it and would have been very excited if he had done more Zelda stuff. The fairies, and especially the wide shot of the dungeon, are pretty awesome in my opinion.

So anyway, thank you Milo, for allowing all of us to enjoy this. After 30 years I'm surprised anyone still had a copy of this magazine. Thank you for locating it, importing it, and scanning it!

I've been working on the site again

Long time, no see.  It's only been about 7 years and a couple of surgeries later! Well, the nostalgia bug bit and I decided to pick up some old projects that I never finished. But first, follow me on Twitter!

1. The official art gallery. Even with amazing newer books, like Art and Artifacts, which added art that had never been public before, a lot of old art is still missing from the internet. At least in a cohesive and easy to reference manner. So I decided to try to complete the gallery. I'm using the same Flickr account. For the past month I've been internally organizing files, scouring the web, and renaming and nit picking the gallery. Right now I'm focused on the 1st four games because they have the most art with odd and scattered sources. Once I'm done adding I'll need to go back and re-edit some files so that we can have one good version instead of 2-4 funky-in-different-ways versions.

Getting the lesser-seen official art online is why I started History of Hyrule in 2002, and here I am after all, unable to leave that task unfinished.

2. Getting the old official manga translated. It's so good and no one has picked it up in all this time. It's really bugging me. One volume is already 35 years old! We need this. So I'll be working on that too after I work on the gallery a bit more. But write me if you can translate, I'll switch gears if it means making this happen.

This is my fav, 4 part series of Legend of Zelda through the Adventure of Link. He has pink hair pre-LttP! And even rides a Loftwing!! (-cough- okay, parrot,) into battle against Ganon:

https://historyofhyrule.com/publications/manga_loz_en/index.html
https://historyofhyrule.com/publications/manga_aol_1/index.html
https://historyofhyrule.com/publications/manga_aol_2/index.html

https://historyofhyrule.com/publications/manga_aol_3/index.html

And this other 3 part Adventure of Link one that sticks incredibly close to the game, closer than any other manga. Don't want to play AoL but want to know what happens? Seriously, here you go:

https://historyofhyrule.com/publications/manga_aol_wan1_en/index.html
https://historyofhyrule.com/publications/manga_aol_wan2/index.html
https://historyofhyrule.com/publications/manga_aol_wan3/index.html

This tLoZ one is pretty cool too, it's almost like a game guide, but I wish Link wasn't so absurd looking. That's the only reason it's last, the rest of it is amazing:

https://historyofhyrule.com/publications/manga_loz_wan/index.html

Please go to History of Hyrule .com

In attempt to use the forums more, and because I don't need to divert traffic because of Hyrule Historia any more, I'm going to stop using Blogger for updates. (I'm just going to keep it for emergencies. Like, if the main site ever goes down, it will be a place you can check.) From now on news and site updates will be found the main page. Thanks guys!

Newly Found Art for Zelda 1

Just added a ton of newly uncovered old art from the original Legend of Zelda game. Cool old-school, and very well done, illustrations of the bad guys, more of Link, and other stuff like item "icons." Find it over on our temporary gallery on flickr: Either on the photostream or in the LoZ set. Hope you like it!

BTW: Everything there is posted super-high-res and feel free to use anything you find to make whatever you want. When possible, credit is simply appreciated and will always count towards brownie points.

Doujinshi Added: Link x Ike

I added a little Link x Ike doujinshi called Obam Oben Je So Vas Ti I Mene, Srekni Praznici by Tamaki T. Check it out!

and, no, I have no idea what that could translate to! Google Translate detects it as... Slovenian?

History of Hyrule

My informal, partial, hiatus is being extended due to the fact that I'm going to be having yet another surgery (a common one but it has a longer recovery time) so I just wanted to make a post to keep at the top of the blog here:

If you didn't know! ~This blogger account is just History of Hyrule's "update" section.

For the real site, which is a work in progress, please go to historyofhyrule.com

I also do a lot of stuff on our Facebook page.

...and I post a lot of fanart and other neat stuff on our Tumblr account.

You can also find our temporary-official-art-gallery-in-progress on Flickr.

I still have thousands of pieces of official art to add... So, right now, the site pretty much only consists of the artwork for the fanart calendar event and then there's the HUGE publication's section ...which has thousands of pages of published material already; but isn't even close to done:

Here's an index of the "Publication" areas you might like the most:

Publication's Section:
. all the zelda doujinshi we have
. . . doujinshi by language
. . . doujinshi by artist
. . . all the zelda doujinshi we don't have
. all the zelda comics I know of (well, I have more web-comics to add)
. all the zelda 4koma I know of
. all the zelda books and novels I know of
. all the zelda manga I know of
. . . manga by language
. . . manga by artist
. . . manga by game
. miscellaneous zelda publications
. a list of every manga, comic, and doujinshi artist I know of

I added a new, but very tiny, little doujinshi today! Omakebon5

The Start of the Book

I just wanted to post a few pages from the intro of Hyrule Historia, in order, to give people an idea of what kind of quality product this is. It very much mirrors the Japanese one, but they added some tiny yet special touches: like the image from the beginning of Skyward Sword to the inside of the cover and back, instead of just having blank paper like the Japanese version did.

The other reason to post the first few pages: it has the credits for the book's production team, and each one of those people deserve to be recognized for all their amazing work.

These also includes the intro by Miyamoto that Dark Horse has typed up on their blog, and then some of the pages of concept art that Kotaku and Dark Horse already posted. So it's not that I'm really showing anything new, it's that I wanted people to understand how beautifully this is laid out. If you're new here, search the "Hyrule Histora" tag on the right of the blog to find out more about this book.

 

If you skip a few pages in, the true concept art pages begin: 

 

The Free 2013 Zelda Calendar (UPDATE)

Happy New Year! It's finally done: Just print it out and you're all set for 2013!
Thank you again to all the amazing artist's who participated to make this happen!

• Here's the .zip with the individual pages as files: 18 Megs
• Here's the .pdf, if that makes printing even easier for you: 23 Megs
• Here's a smaller, lower quality, .pdf for people who don't have fast connections: 4 Megs

You can also download the .zip it on my DeviantART account.
Let me know if you have any trouble with those, or if you spot any errors. I had to shorten some of the original descriptions by the artists so they'd fit the template, so be sure to check out the original pieces for the full ones! They're great.

Go here to see ALL the entries from this year's event! 

Sorry it took me so long to get this posted. I got it done a while ago but I wanted to double check it; then I got the flu, which prevented me from getting on the computer.

EDIT:
Remember, you can make your own version using the blank template and any of the spectacular 250+ entries! 

• Here's the blank "Make your Own" calendar template: 3 Megs
• All the entries for the 2013 event: "History of Hyrule" theme.
• All the entries for the 2012 event: "Music Festival" theme.

Dark Horse just released ALL the English Skyward Sword Prequel Manga Pages

Dark Horse has released all of the pages of the Skyward Sword "Prequel" manga, by Akira Himekawa, as a promo for the Hyrule Historia Book that's for pre-order now (Find out where to buy it here)

It seems to have been released via Kotaku, and I discovered the news thanks to GenGame. Their page reader shows the pages in the reversed order though, so I've put them in the right order, of first to last, below. Read them right to left, or "Japanese style." Enjoy!

Please buy the book! It's going to be AMAZING! And it's SO CHEAP on pre-order.
Thank you Dark Horse!