The biggest challenge about this one was, that the original Sonic looks everything but realistic. He is so stylized, that it’s hard to tell if he is a hedgehog at all. This made it hard to find a middle course between the initial design and the look of a real hedgehog.
If I would stick to much to the original it wouldn’t look pretty realistic, but if I would get to close to the actual animal one wouldn’t be able to identify him as Sonic.
This was challenging, but also the most interesting part about doing this picture. Until the final design Sonic went thru several revisions.
In the end I decided to give him a color-pattern that resembles a West European Hedgehog but facial proportions that stick to Sonic himself. His white gloves and the red shoes he kept as another link to the original, but the shoes underwent a little redesign. In addition his body looks like that of a runner, making it more believable that he can run at such high speeds.
Finally I did a little old-school pixel-graphic of how a realistic Sonic would look like in one of the old games.
Again the whole picture was painted using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and my Wacom Intuos3 Pen Tablet. No filters or any other stuff like that, just a round brush (mostly pressure-sensitive) and a little bit of the smudge tool. I also tried to keep the numbers of layers as low as possible and reduced them to the background-layer, if I could.
Keeping my means simple and do everything manual gives me more control over what I do and the image gets a more picturesque look instead of the typical Photoshop look.
I like how the spikes in the pixelated version still resemble Sonic's, showing how the original art for him (from the games) was meant to be his quills ruffed together like that. (You probably all realized that a while ago... I think I just did...).
