How to draw Link from the Zelda Wind Waker.

Zelda Wind Waker has in my opinion the best art direction of all the Zelda games. The papercut manga art style match the mood perfectly. It will be a lot of fun to draw Link this way, lets start!

Step 1: Start with a slightly stretched circle. It is only about 15% taller then wide. Make sure to leave a lot of space below for the body and legs and some space above for hair and cap!

Step 2: Add slightly curved Eye line and Nose line. Points 1, 2 and 3 should be in the middle of the circle.

Step 3: Lets add a bean shape for the body. It's about 10% longer than head. That's right, he's got a really big head  Notice that the body is thinner than the head too. Draw a half circle for neck touching the head and overlapping the body.

Step 4: Study the rhytm of the legs. The shorter leg is about half the size of the body shape (bean). Draw a line under the bean shape to mark the bottom of the link’s tunic.

Step 5: Draw arm and hand. The bottom of the hand should be slightly higher than the bottom of the body.

Step 6: To draw the sword draw two straight lines from the hand pointing toward the foot on the left.

Step 7: Draw second arm. The bottom of the hand line is passing through the middle of the hand on the right.

Step 8: Ok, we have the basic proportions in place and we can start adding details. Lighten the layer with the construction lines and start to draw in another layer above it. If you are drawing on paper just lighten the construction lines with kneedable eraser so they are barely visible. Draw the hair and ear.

Step 9: Add eyes. Eyes are most important part of every character so concentrate on it in order to do it right! The edges of the eyes should sit on the eye line (except maybe the left edge of the eye on the left ). Draw the dot for the nose and mouth stretching almost from pupil to pupil.

Step 10: Draw the ears,cap and add the hair bang on the left.

Step 11:  Draw the details for his clothes and hand. Notice the sharp angles where the cloth folds. Draw the neck in V shape.

Step 12:  Draw the construction lines for belt and continue adding details to the clothes and hand.

Step 13:  Draw the details to the hand on right. Sketch the shield behind Link’s back and the sword sheath above his shoulder.

Step 14: Draw the sword handle.

Step 15: Add some details to the shield, sword sheath and belt buckle.

Step 16: Now that we have all the construction lines in place, lighten them again using your kneedable eraser or layer transparency. If you are in Open Canvas or Photoshop create a new layer for final black lines. The eyes are quite delicate so while we will try to simulate a torn paper quality line in most of the parts try to keep the eyes clean.

Step 17: Continue with outlining/darkening the construction lines. The trick is to set up a really hard brush or use a properly sharpened pencil so that the edges of the lines are hard and you can simulate the torn paper with sharp angles and various thicknesses of line.

Step 18: Finish the hair and add some shading with hard parallel lines. Keep these thinner than the outline lines.

Step 19: The lines of body are slightly more rough than the head lines in general.

Step 20: Fill the buckle in with black but make the center spiral line delicate.

Step 21: Shade in the sword. Fill the bottom half of it with black and add delicate shading lines close to the leg on the right.

Step 22: Finish the body outline and shade in the shield. It should be quite dark. What I do is that I outline the small white areas and fill the rest in with black. However make sure that you draw them a little bigger as the outline of them will merge with the black background and they will visually appear much smaller after they touch the black surroundings. Draw the detail to the sheath.

Step 23: Oh, I forgot to draw the left ear. I also made some small touch ups to the head and our Link is finished ! We will continue with a coloring tutorial in the future