Welcome to my process notes! I took a bit of a different approach to this piece than I did with my last couple of works. For the last few works I've done, I started with pencils and moved in a careful, calculated way up to line work, then refining the line work, then adding color.

This time, I skipped the pencil stage and went straight to working in pen! I thought to myself, "how do I usually sketch?" Usually (that is - when I'm just drawing in my sketchbook, and not drawing anime / video game related fanart), I work this way - without even glancing at a pencil. I have a much freer and looser style. I take liberties and embrace mistakes. Generally, when I'm drawing fanart for this site, I work in a bit more of a constrained and careful fashion - so I wanted to reverse things!

One of my favorite things to do is go to see live music - and draw the musicians. Those are usually pretty terrible conditions to draw in - the lighting is poor in the audience, the musicians are constantly moving, and I generally have to stand among dancing people (incidentally, I can draw while simultaneously dancing!). And under those conditions, I draw a rough sketch in orange, to get the basic forms down before I go back with a blue or black pen to really choose some lines and develop some interesting line work. So that's the process I applied here - start with orange. As you can see with Link's left leg, I first drew it one way, and then decided I didn't like that and drew it in a different position (and thus that area of the drawing became a tangled mess of orange lines!). Then it was the blue pen to the rescue. I brought some more careful lines to the mix with the blue.

After that, I decided to push my luck even further, and play with some water colors on top of everything! This was somewhat of a poor choice, given that the blue pen I used is not at all water-fast. It bled everywhere. But this is what I do with my style - very flexible, just embrace the little challenges as they come. The resultant drawing isn't as "clean" as many of my other drawings, but I actually happen to like the gritty truth of this - it bears witness to the entire process. Let me know what you think!