Zelda: The Last Hylurian War marks the beginning of our artist commentaries. We discovered this incredible fan art by freelance artist Tyler Edlin and wanted to learn more about it. Step by step, Tyler takes us through the process of his work and explains his personal take on the Zelda franchise. He also reveals the ambitions behind this project and shares his thoughts on the series' evolution.

Hi, thanks for featuring my latest piece Zelda: The Last Hyrulian War piece on your site. My name is Tyler Edlin I’m going to talk about the the process and my thoughts on it.

I'll start off by saying I have been wanting to do a piece on Link for a year now. I have been playing the games and the series since I was 6. Link is such an iconic character that I just didn’t want to rush a new piece of him out, I wanted so make sure I had the skills and confidence do the character justice and both satisfy me and other hardcore fans. So after viewing the trailers and of Skyward Sword from this years E3 I was thoroughly disappointed regarding the artistic direction because the I feel Nintendo just doesn’t take the series serious enough for some of the older more mature fans of the series. So my piece is just a direct reaction to it, same old Link more just even more epic and would have more serious undertones in it.

For inspiration I was directly thinking of a few things. First Frank Frazetta, I want to capture his stylized and cinematic lighting as well as the power and impact that are found in his characters. Second I was rather moved by Kekai Kotaki’s work on the guild Wars franchise. His work is of the same genre of the Zelda series but is bolder, more stylized and epic in scope, I wanted to bring all of that to a Zelda painting.

As for the process drew a sketch that featured a bulk of the characters and detail.

Then my next goal typically in painting is to start blocking out the major values in grayscale.

Once that is completed I move right into color by splashing the underlying and major hues in place.

At this stage the challenge was the background I was still unsure of how to handle it. I painted several different versions of the clouds and ultimately settled on simple stylized formations in bold orange hues.

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