Living fanart field guides

I’m a fan of nature journals and field guides, and grease pencil gave me a way to make my own… and to have them come to life.

These are all fanart pieces for the video games Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Don’t Starve, and Stardew Valley. I don’t own the characters and they were not made for profit, just to practice different tools and techniques to be able to teach them.

 
 

Zelda Breath of the Wild field guides

Here is a compilation of the three living field guides I made for the game Zelda Breath of the Wild.

What I really enjoyed about these pieces is that I challenged myself to try something new with each. For these pages above, I experimented with adding animation to my pages: for the Korok page I did this using grease pencil’s interpolation tool and modifiers; for the Zora page I used a background paper texture animation, as well as grease pencil layer opacities and effects; and for the horse page, I used a rig that I parented the grease pencil to.

 

More of my living field guides

 

Here are videos or tutorials in which I explain how I made some of these pieces:

In this tutorial, I take you through the steps of how I made and animated the 3D horse skeleton, from the Zelda horse page.

This video is my introduction to masking within grease pencil, which really helped me to make the Zelda Korok page.

And this is a continuation of grease pencil masking: as I went on to make the Stardew Valley pages, my process got more complex and I found a new solution.

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