Behind the Waterfall

Prize art for *shoujo-sugar for winning 1st place #In-Love-with-Link's contest. Her request was "... OoT Link playing his ocarina? Can his hair and clothes be all windy too? XD I'd like Navi to be with him... *w* just floating by his side, like she always is."

Oh boy, the cg definitely took a lot more time than the lineart itself. So for this exercise I wanted to do lineless cg, which is something I've never really tried before. I think I'm going to go back to doing my usual cg. XD Stupid me finally learned to adjust the flow instead of just playing with opacity of the brush. Boy, did that help a lot with the coloring. I ended up not using texture brushes except for the background.

I wanted a simple background because the main focus was Link and Navi. For the longest time I was stumped about the background. I finally decided to do a rock wall and maybe a forest, but as I was trying to create the tree trunks, I realized that it was looking like water so the forest became a waterfall. This turned out to be a fortuitous find because it allowed me to keep the bluish glow while still keeping the colors quite bright and saturated. I was thinking about doing a night or dusk scene, but this is for the better. Now it feels more airy.

I'm still not 100% happy with the way Link's face looks so I might go back to retweak it some more. I do like his hair though. I was trying something a bit different there.

Special thanks to *Woodland-Mel and ~Michi27 for their invaluable critiques and the others at the History of Hyrule for their support. :3

Anyway, I hope *shoujo-sugar likes it.

EDIT: fixed a couple of things as well as added darker eye brows and eye lashes, as suggested by *imw83

Aaaaaand, I just can't leave this pic alone. Darken the eye lashes more as well as darken the iris. Now, finally Link's starting to look better! XD

You can see my progress here: [link]