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In the original Ocarina of Time, young princess Zelda was a busty short-stack. That girl had a RACK on her!
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And this texture across the front. It’s like her nipples are pitching tents under there. She is VERY happy to see Link!
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Of course they completely removed all of that in the 3DS remake.
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So I think I’ll try drawing horny short-stack Zelda, the way Nintendo intended!
Along with her iconic bedroom eyes.
All the girls in this game give Link that look.
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Ruto was pretty busty too.
They could only spare 3 triangles for the main character’s nose but the developers made sure to set aside a few DOZEN polygons for that chest!
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To get reference material for cloth draped over boobs, let’s just search for statues. I don’t even need to search for breasts. Fabric and breasts have historically always been popular in stone statue carving.
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I sketched this in three layers with tracing paper to add details on top of what I had before. Then I scanned it in on a flat-bed scanner. The colors were added in Photoshop.
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This is the part where I figure out what size I want my sprite to be.
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Faces tend to be the hardest part so lets pick a small detail on the face that I want to show clearly. Measuring the mouth, it is about 21 pixels tall. I think I want give myself 3 pixels of height to draw the mouth. So now let’s break out the ‘ol proportion formula and figure out what percentage to scale this down to make the mouth 3 pixels tall.
21px -> 3px
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100% ?%
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Now I just divide diagonal numbers and divide by the remaining number. So multiply 3px times 100%, and then divide by 21px, and the answer is just a little over 14%
I’ll round up to 15% to give myself slightly more breathing room.
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The left picture is my intended sprite size.
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The right picture is double that size, because I like to ink over sketches at double the intended size. You’ll see why later.
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Now to trace over this sketch with vector lines in Paint Tool Sai using it’s intuitive “curve” tool.
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And now for a few final adjustments. Scale the vector lines down to half size. (the intended size of the sprite) And adjust a few things to space out the lines a little more to clarify a few details. Then scale it back up to double size.
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And finally I’ll bring in the double-sized line art into Photoshop and scale it down with bilinear scaling to create this picture with nice clear details for me to trace over to Aseprite in create sprite-art.
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It looks very similar to the small picture in Paint Tool Sai, but scaling in Photoshop creates slightly cleaner results for some reason.
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Aside from a few adjustments here and there, this is a pretty straight-forward process.
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Here’s a comparison of before and after. I started with the scaled down vector lines, and ended up with sprite art. The idea is to make every detail as clear as possible.
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(…and accidentally leave out her feet, whoopsie)
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There, now she has feet
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I also slut-ified her expression more. You know… to keep her in-character. It’s just not N64 Zelda unless she is undressing Link with her eyes.
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Hmm… not bad.
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All of that reference material of statues is really paying off. Nah that’s a lie. I keep forgetting to look at them. But in spite of that this picture managed to come out pretty decent anyway.
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Maybe I’ll try fading some of the outlines for the fabric folds to make them blend in more seamlessly.
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Also color… I was planning to add that at some point.
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Fading some of the outlines does seem to blend them into the shading pretty seamlessly.
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Zelda is VERY happy to see Link!
