… with a sketch, of course. And in this case, a series of sketch studies from the original game manual from the very first Legend of Zelda game for the NES. I was there… at 6 years old, no less, pouring over this booklet and trying to decipher it’s secrets, and absorbing the wonderful illustrations.
The game, of course, was too hard for me to get far in, but nonetheless I ate up the aesthetics and became a lifelong fan. Not to mention that my father was a writer on the animated series, so I got to have some secondhand pride in that as well.
Revisiting the game art after all these years was the subject of my very first stream on twitch in Nov 2023, when it was clear that the disruptive effects of genAI on my career (I’ve been a professional illustrator and storyboard artist for 20 years) weren’t just speculative; clients were actively opting to use Midjourney as their go-to solution for art needs. Thus a real threat had emerged to challenge my supremacy, and two things became clear: If i was to adapt and survive, I needed to really up my skill level, and I’d need strong allies to make the case for the validity of hiring real artists.
About that time, the Zelda movie was officially announced as being developed, and I had the idea of putting together a spec portfolio of Zelda storyboards and keyframes, but finished with a high degree of polish, so as to demonstrate my skill.
But a dilemma: in this new world of scraping and generating, how could I attach assurances that my hand had done the work? Already “artists” were generating storyboarding samples with AI. I reasoned that drawing it live on stream would be the best recourse to any claims of cheating.
My brother was already streaming regularly on his variety Twitch channel, and encouraged my efforts and helped me get started with my first streams. It also occured to me that this would be a great way to practice and soft-launch my until-then separate venture, Join Max, which was an idea I had for an eventual “secondary career” as a traveling art teacher (theoretically for when I would be nearing retirement age.)
With no real teaching or demoing experience, I had to just opt to what I could do quickly and sustainably- engage on a Spec Work project on stream and proceed as I would if it was a real job, thereby practicing and demonstrating best practices and real world approaches and results, and staying 100% authentic to my skillset and interests.
And so, as I would prefer on any real paying work project, I started by analyzing and copying prior art- in this case, the original, foundational game art of the Zelda series, that set the standard for the countless iterations to follow. What resulted was a dozen or so faithfully reproduced sketches, and the spark to continue and see where it led.
