Art Of Totoro : Not The Ghibli Kind

The Pub. Click for fullsize. (Via)

I think that even the developers of the Professor Layton series were surprised when their puzzle centric Layton Series took off in the US and Europe. The game offered a very different approach to their gameplay, requiring players to take on and solve increasingly complex puzzles in order to progress, mixed with a very appealing art style that had a strong European flair to it. The combination was a winning one, spawning a variety of sequels, movies and even knockoffs (Konami's Dr. Lautrec comes to mind).

The work of Totoro, an anonymous 30 year old female Japanese artist really baffled me at first, because I couldn't place whether or not this was unseen art for a past Layton game, a future one, or just really well made fanart. And after a little research, I couldn't confirm excatly where this artists work fell due to the artists decision to withhold any personal information on her site. Nonetheless, I found her work to be so well done that it might as well have been official art for one of the Layton installments, nailing the core visual style and expanding on the Layton world. Check out more of her tribute pieces after the break, with a few personal pieces sprinkled in!