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Description
Full view please, you really can’t appreciate this fully unless you do so

Well, THIS was a long time coming! I started it, what, a month ago? Then I got that nasty, evil artist’s block and as such, didn’t really have the motivation to get this finished off until now.

OK, explanation time. There IS a reason why the background looks kinda linear/flat instead of having Sonic interacting with part of it as such and/or making it look 3D (can’t explain it any better than that, but I’m sure you all know what I’m getting at), it’s not just me being lazy or anything, honestly No, really; I was playing good old Sonic 1 on the Mega Drive again a while back, which is what inspired me to do this. Playing the Green Hill Zone is one of the highlights of my time as a gamer, I love it so much and I’ll never forget the first time I played it. With it being a 2D game, I wanted to reflect that with a part of the picture; and the background was the easiest thing to do that way. Although, I wanted to add a bit of a 3D edge with Sonic himself (as well as the “Buzz Bomber” Badnik, to an extent), making it look like he’s springing away from the Zone – I’m SO happy with how he turned out! A little bit of perspective work going on there, with his hand reaching out for the ring and whatever His spines are on one side like that because, I wanted it to look like he’d just turned his head to look at the ring and reach out to catch it; his spines WOULD move like that, I’m sure, if he turned his head quickly. The blur on the spring and on Sonic himself was hard to get right, but I think it was worth messing about with so much. And those CLOUDS – wow, I dunno how I did that, but they turned out about 100 times better than I was anticipating XD Same goes for the water, too, I love how it looks. Any slight inaccuracies in the details are there because, for the most part, I drew this from memory. I had to look at a couple of little things in the game, but yeah, about 90% of this was drawn with no reference pictures whatsoever

I’m so happy with the colouring; I think it’s one of my best CGing jobs yet. I inked it in Flash and then coloured using just paintbrushes in Photoshop, and a tiny bit of layer-tweaking here and there. OMG, layers! At one point I had -55- of them; it nearly killed my computer and I actually couldn’t open the image for a while at one stage because it was so bloody huge XD I therefore had to merge some of the layers unfortunately, which hindered me a little with getting it completed because it was harder to edit the shading. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, because I got there in the end ^_- Oh, and I know it’s watermarked twice, it’s not a mistake – I –HATE- art theft (I’ve had my stuff stolen before, and it sucks beyond belief when that happens, trust me) and I’m doing stuff like this to try and stop it happening again.

Overall, I am so, SO proud of this; I can’t begin to tell you how much effort went into it (I didn’t count hours, but considering the time scale in terms of days spent on this, I’d guess it’s somewhere around 30… o_o;; ) and I’m so pleased it paid off. It was a long time coming, and whilst some little things might have been done better, on the whole I think I’ve done really well. It’s the first time in absolute YEARS that I’ve drawn my own background; and it won’t be the last time either – watch this space… ^_- I mentioned this to a couple of people a while back but, from now on I’m not gonna limit myself to JUST Sonic art; don’t get me wrong, I love drawing Sonic, but now when I do Sonic stuff, I want to try and get it more like this – a picture that’s gonna be pushing my art to the limit, a good challenge. And when it’s NOT Sonic… I dunno, I’m working on a few things (all still video-game related though, fan-art’s how I started as an artist back when I was a kid and it’s how I’m gonna continue for the foreseeable future), but I’ll wait and see how they turn out. So yeah, I –am- still doing Sonic MOST of the time, just not ALL the time any more; and I’m gonna try and make my Sonic art noticeably better, too, like this. I seem to have been stuck at the same skill level for a while now with my Sonic drawings and I’m determined to push my art forwards more.

Anyway; enjoy! And feel free to post any sort of comments (detailed or not) – as always, I appreciate anything you guys have to say about my works ^^

(Image ©
The characters, Sonic the Hedgehog and “Buzz Bomber”, and the Green Hill Zone location, are © SEGA/Sonic Team.
Please, PLEASE: DO NOT edit, use, copy or redistribute without permission!)

Description
Full view please, you really can’t appreciate this fully unless you do so

Well, THIS was a long time coming! I started it, what, a month ago? Then I got that nasty, evil artist’s block and as such, didn’t really have the motivation to get this finished off until now.

OK, explanation time. There IS a reason why the background looks kinda linear/flat instead of having Sonic interacting with part of it as such and/or making it look 3D (can’t explain it any better than that, but I’m sure you all know what I’m getting at), it’s not just me being lazy or anything, honestly No, really; I was playing good old Sonic 1 on the Mega Drive again a while back, which is what inspired me to do this. Playing the Green Hill Zone is one of the highlights of my time as a gamer, I love it so much and I’ll never forget the first time I played it. With it being a 2D game, I wanted to reflect that with a part of the picture; and the background was the easiest thing to do that way. Although, I wanted to add a bit of a 3D edge with Sonic himself (as well as the “Buzz Bomber” Badnik, to an extent), making it look like he’s springing away from the Zone – I’m SO happy with how he turned out! A little bit of perspective work going on there, with his hand reaching out for the ring and whatever His spines are on one side like that because, I wanted it to look like he’d just turned his head to look at the ring and reach out to catch it; his spines WOULD move like that, I’m sure, if he turned his head quickly. The blur on the spring and on Sonic himself was hard to get right, but I think it was worth messing about with so much. And those CLOUDS – wow, I dunno how I did that, but they turned out about 100 times better than I was anticipating XD Same goes for the water, too, I love how it looks. Any slight inaccuracies in the details are there because, for the most part, I drew this from memory. I had to look at a couple of little things in the game, but yeah, about 90% of this was drawn with no reference pictures whatsoever

I’m so happy with the colouring; I think it’s one of my best CGing jobs yet. I inked it in Flash and then coloured using just paintbrushes in Photoshop, and a tiny bit of layer-tweaking here and there. OMG, layers! At one point I had -55- of them; it nearly killed my computer and I actually couldn’t open the image for a while at one stage because it was so bloody huge XD I therefore had to merge some of the layers unfortunately, which hindered me a little with getting it completed because it was harder to edit the shading. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, because I got there in the end ^_- Oh, and I know it’s watermarked twice, it’s not a mistake – I –HATE- art theft (I’ve had my stuff stolen before, and it sucks beyond belief when that happens, trust me) and I’m doing stuff like this to try and stop it happening again.

Overall, I am so, SO proud of this; I can’t begin to tell you how much effort went into it (I didn’t count hours, but considering the time scale in terms of days spent on this, I’d guess it’s somewhere around 30… o_o;; ) and I’m so pleased it paid off. It was a long time coming, and whilst some little things might have been done better, on the whole I think I’ve done really well. It’s the first time in absolute YEARS that I’ve drawn my own background; and it won’t be the last time either – watch this space… ^_- I mentioned this to a couple of people a while back but, from now on I’m not gonna limit myself to JUST Sonic art; don’t get me wrong, I love drawing Sonic, but now when I do Sonic stuff, I want to try and get it more like this – a picture that’s gonna be pushing my art to the limit, a good challenge. And when it’s NOT Sonic… I dunno, I’m working on a few things (all still video-game related though, fan-art’s how I started as an artist back when I was a kid and it’s how I’m gonna continue for the foreseeable future), but I’ll wait and see how they turn out. So yeah, I –am- still doing Sonic MOST of the time, just not ALL the time any more; and I’m gonna try and make my Sonic art noticeably better, too, like this. I seem to have been stuck at the same skill level for a while now with my Sonic drawings and I’m determined to push my art forwards more.

Anyway; enjoy! And feel free to post any sort of comments (detailed or not) – as always, I appreciate anything you guys have to say about my works ^^

(Image ©
The characters, Sonic the Hedgehog and “Buzz Bomber”, and the Green Hill Zone location, are © SEGA/Sonic Team.
Please, PLEASE: DO NOT edit, use, copy or redistribute without permission!)