my earth wears scales just like me. they change their color just like mine.

Sorry this took so long. Had a lot of things get in the way of completing it.

I always enjoyed the illustrations at the beginning of the NES manual as a kid, and it saddened me to find out these weren’t actually part of a real animated promotion for the game. So I decided to take those illustrations and re-create them as if they were! Enjoy this long-lost VHS promotion for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on the Nintendo Entertainment System!

Voice narration by Dylan Luke

Animated in Procreate and Procreate Dreams

I purposefully used a brush that would crack and wobble, resulting in uneven and unsteady linework. I let the painting be messy, allowing the paint to show through the linework a little bit here and there if I made a mistake. And I added hand drawn shadow layers underneath each character in each frame to simulate the effect of having multiple layers of cels.

But the thing that really made it “feel” the most authentic to me was the fact that I added a 5% opacity black layer between each character. This, along with the shadows under each character, was to simulate the light diffusing effect multiple cel layers had on animation.

You can really see it in this example if I slow down adding all the layers. With each new character added, the background and underlying character become just slightly darker.

5% doesn’t sound like it would be that noticeable, but once a bunch of layers get added you can definitely start to feel like there’s something going on. Watch how the colors in the background darken and become slightly muddier than their initial vibrant look. And see how characters in the front have brighter colors than ones in the back using the same colors.

🗡️ CONTRIBUTOR INTRO 🗡️

“Do Dead Malls Go To Heaven?”