My tribute to The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening, for the original Game Boy and later Game Boy Colour. In my opinion, still one of the finest games ever made, if not THE finest. The continuity games, Ocarina, Link to the Past and Wind Waker, are all great, but this is by far my favourite, being the perfect little companion for any given journey or sit-up-in-bed-playing-on-the-Game-Boy session.

Keen-eyed Zelda fans will notice Link is off-model here (as is the owl, if you want to be really pedantic). The reason is that this picture is my attempt to illustrate WHY this game was so important when I was 14. The purpose wasn't to draw the characters as they're shown in the manual and other related artwork, but to draw the characters I felt I was looking at, back when I would sit up in bed at night playing through this marvellous game.

If I had my way I'd have been able to include something to suggest the feeling of freedom at the very start of the game, when you realise you can just wander right into people's houses and talk to them. It's rare for an RPG to feel so much like walking about and living a life the way this one did.

The pic was an accident. Abby was playing Ocarina to my right, and I decided to see how Link would look if I drew him. Me drawing anything is usually an exercise in "what would this look like", since my style's so odd. After Link was drawn, it seemed right to have him standing in a patch of cut grass, and from there the rocks appeared, Bow-Wow and the sign. As I got more into it I fired up the game to copy the font for the sign (a reference to the way I would stare at the cartridge in my hand for minutes on end, marvelling at how an entire world had been jammed into what was back then a very small cart), copied the owl, and the tree. Initially I put a generic wall in the background to block it off, and had a cave door in it, but at Abby's advice i got rid of that and put in a lot more mountain, and the resulting composition looks lovely - and is a triangle, very important of course.

And then I flat-coloured it because it was getting a bit complicated to look at in black and white. I don't know the first ... well, the third thing about Photoshop, so try not to think too hard about the colouring. It's just there so you can see stuff clearly.

I haven't got the hang of the new categories yet. Does this belong in digital art? I assumed since I coloured it digitally it sort of goes there, although it's a shame because it's the drawing rather than the colouring that I think is the focus of this one. Let me know if anyone thinks it's mis-categorised.