Hello, my friends!
A lot of times, I find myself posting different character designs and concept art on status updates here on SSMB, and ask for opinions and constructive criticism on them. I figured that instead of doing that, I might be better off just making a topic for this stuff in the Sonic Showcase thread... so here I am! The stuff I'll be posting here is mostly artwork and concept art of Sonic characters drawn in my own style, which I will be using for animated parody videos later down the road. I want my future animation to appeal to a wide audience, but the Sonic stuff is made with mostly Sonic fans in mind (naturally), which is why I care about what Sonic fans think of my work. There are also many, many talented people on here as I've discovered after looking at other topics in this thread, so I think it would be super swell to get constructive criticism from them as well. 
To start off, I'll be showing everything that I have thus far.
Here, we've got near final concept art of the main cast (I say "near final" because I may do some tweaking to them before I actually start up my animation) that I've shared before. As you can see, pretty much everyone is off model. I used to try to draw the characters as on-model as possible, but I realized that for parody work, it would be better if this wasn't the case, and I just made the characters in my own style. It's also kind of a throwback to old video game cartoons, in that a lot of characters almost never looked like they did in the games (remember Bowser in the Mario cartoons? What about Mega Man in "Captain N: The Game Master"? Haha...). Even though I draw the characters to fit my style, I've been really inspired by the older Sonic cartoons, as you can probably tell. For starters, I drew a lot of inspiration from AoStH when making Sonic and Tails. For Sonic, the design in AoStH was obviously based off of the classic design, but in my videos, there is no "classic" or "modern" Sonic. There's just Sonic. I tried to take elements from both designs when drawing Sonic. The design looks more classic, but the color schemes are more reminiscent of the modern design. On most of the characters, the eyes are drawn as just black dots, however, their eyes are actually supposed to be the color of the modern designs... it's just simplified. If Sonic's eyes were to ever bug out in a cartoony fashion for example, they would be seen as green. As you can tell, Tails' color scheme is a mix of AoStH and SatAM (the shoes), though I may change his color to more of an orange for the final design. Not much to say with Knuckles and Shadow... I just designed them to fit in with the rest. Amy was purposely drawn as just a pink Sonic with a dress and a bow as kind of an homage to Mickey and Minnie. Metal Sonic is obviously the most off-model, haha, being a parody of the Tin-man from Wizard of Oz. Eggman is a mixture of his classic design with a bit of AoStH Robotnik in there.
Lastly, we've another Sonic, this time facing the front. Now, as I said, my Sonic design was inspired by the old Sonic cartoons, which is why I've adopted the whole "three flat quills" look as I like to call it. Basically, in most of the Sonic cartoons, Sonic's quills would stay the same shape, no matter which direction he's facing, similarly to Mickey Mouse's ears, which is something I've always liked. Obviously, Sonic doesn't have three quills on his head, he has six, and they aren't flat. I think in 2D animation, however, it's easier to animate Sonic with the three flat quills style, which aside from being an homage to the old Sonic cartoons, is the reason I'm doing this. In this picture, however, his quills are the same shape they would be if he were to be facing the side, but they're raised quite a bit. This image was actually inspired by this still of Sonic facing the front in AoStH:
Welp... that's everything I have so far. Like I said, I'd love to hear some feedback and constructive criticism from you guys, as I really want to know what the Sonic fans think. Thanks so much in advance. I'll likely be posting more designs when I make them in the near future.
EDIT: Gonna add a more recent drawing in the OP because I can't stand to look at my old stuff... xD Here's the banner I did for some shit-ass site called "The Sonic Stadium". pffffffffff
Edited by Alexander, 04 May 2013 - 03:18 AM.
