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maurofonseca · 3 years ago

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SURGE THE TENREC CONCEPT ART AND DESIGNING THREAD

Ok I’ve promised to make this for weeks now, so here.

Here’s the twitter thread that’s got all the images in case I end up not posting any of them here.

Click through to read my thoughts and inspirations on designing Surge, with stuff like “why did she have a kanabou” or “why did she beat Sonic in that one sheet”!

1. Ian’s description of her that I got to see.

2. Evan told me she had to design these characters and I started doodling them too for fun, just bouncing ideas off of her. You can see in some weird way, the final Surge is already here- the concept of the ponytail, the delinquent look, the baggy pants, very inspired by characters like Leona Heidern and early 2000s urban fashion. Kit meanwhile, we didn’t really have a handle on yet. I did the one on the top left not taking his personality into account, just focusing on doing a Y2K-esque design; on the bottom right, I did one where he’s inside a robot suit that Surge can then use as a water vehicle, which was just a random idea I had. These weren’t done for Ian or Editorial yet, just me and Evan having fun.

3. At this point I was officially asked to contribute, rather than just doing my sketches “under the table” as part of discussions with Evan. There wasn't yet a plan that I'd do Surge and Evan'd do Kit, it's just Surge popped in my head with so many cool concepts I kept drawing for fun.

Outfits and hairdos based on Hana no Asuka-Gumi, jacket taken from Kaneda from Akira, nose being blue was inspired by Fang. The start of "maybe we can use Sango Morimoto's Amy as inspiration", a bob cut inspired by DBZ's Android 18 as was the eye shape and eyelashes. The yellow and black colours had been decided on by Ian, IIRC (I didn’t show the entire description since it has spoilers), but I leaned hard on them since they gave me Oni imagery, especially stuff like Lum from Urusei Yatsura. Since stereotypes of Sukeban often involved long skirts, I played with giving her one of those too; and I liked the idea of her having an emblem in her jacket, where I tried a variation on the classic Sonic Emblem and also a simple emblem from a stereotypical Raijin drums set.

4. Evan at one point sketched an idea of a more “traditional” “tenrec-y” spiked hairdo, and that’s the one I drew on the top left then. I really liked the Sango Morimoto Amy and Android 18 hairdos too, and I gave her spiky sideburns on that one hairdo to give her a 70s anime protagonist feel like Kouji Kabuto or Cutie Honey; this was an idea I’d had before for a new design for Amy on the fancomic Sonic the Comic-Online, and as later pointed out to me, it’s just a design element I like and thus keep reusing over and over. We were going all in on the more Akira-like delinquent look with the baggy jacket etc; her shoes are ripped in the back thanks to something I read a long time ago (and which I can’t find nowadays so maybe it was wrong?) that Sukeban Japanese Delinquent girls would mash in the back of their shoes to wear them as slippers. She also got a Kanabou to use, inspired by Raijin and Oni depictions and probably also specifically from One Piece’s Yamato.

Meanwhile over on Kit, I was pushing “emo haircut” to the comical extreme and just covering his eyes entirely, just like an old sprite character I had a decade or more ago. I was also getting reminded of the King of Sorrows from Klonoa 2, which ended up being a double-edged sword; it gave the right inspiration to push his design through, but then I was finding myself unable to do anything but draw him like that. So this is sort of when we ended up deciding Evan’d take point finishing him and I’d finish Surge, since she wouldn’t have such a strong connection to Klonoa 2, etc. As for the tail, Ian’s pitch specified him having a machine to make water “tails” out from, but we kept experimenting with it being a ring in the tail so as to make the “tails” come from the real tail, but in the end we moved it to a backpack.

The sprites are just a test on how the designs were coming along. The Sonic and Tails are fan sprites from a project revamping old Modern Genesis sprites into a new standard. I’m a proponent of spriting designs in as part of the design process- it helps clean out unneeded detail and see how the colour areas are coming along together. After all, decisions like Sonic’s peach arms existed exactly due to sprites, right?

5. Offering some alternatives on hairdos. Evan’s take, Evan’s take simplified, the Sango Morimoto-based one, one based on StC Amy, the Android 18, and Evan’s again, and all of these with and without black marks. Ian’s preference was towards Evan’s, since they were spiky and worked better in his concept as “an imposter of Sonic”, who also has spiky hair; but he was open to seeing what everyone agreed on.

I made a mention of not using the black marks because I think marks are overused in Sonic design, when you look at the core cast and see they don’t have them. That said I ended up liking the idea of just making one strong black spot to really underline the homage to the Ashura fandom character and also to make her entire face a bit more unreadable. The eyelids are also black, merging with her mark.

As I mention, the Kanabou was designed to resemble a baseball bat while looking sillier, since I didn’t think a realistic weapon would be fitting.

6. The Kanabou was dropped, since it pushed her into looking too much like Amy, and also brought up a lot of logistics questions- why and how does she have it? Does she carry it around? Do we have to constantly show her with it? Etc.

With that said, the basic idea of her using charging metal to attack with, giving her electricity an offensive element rather than just being a visual element of her running, did stick. It was suggested to give her knuckledusters, but like with the baseball bat, I felt it was too realistic and off-key for the setting; trying to think of a more cartoony take on the idea I remembered comic book hero The Phantom, who has a ring on each hand he uses to punch people with. First I tried giving her just the one ring like the Phantom, but when later I wanted to draw her doing an arc of electricity with her hand, the idea came to give her rings in the index and pinkie instead, and it stuck.

You can see I’d finally been sold on the black facemark and also this specific outfit. The concept was to give her thick arms and thin legs, a silhouette that we didn’t have yet in Sonic as far as I recalled. The shoes were inspired by Classic Amy’s, just with the Sukeban back-ripping bit, and metal covers for the electric fighting; and otherwise the outfit was also inspired by Yuji Uekawa’s famous “Gamer of the future” artwork that depicts a kid with a very Sonic-like attire and hairdo.

7. With that said I didn’t want to restrict choices so I tried to come up with other outfits. I really don’t like this image, lol. The outfits are uninspired, and I still wasn’t sure how to draw her muzzle, so it just looks weird and long here. I also did a variation where the yellow got replaced with dark green as a test, but it wasn’t liked.

8. In the end we were generally agreeing on the jacket and think pants, so I instead practiced some variations on the jacket, some based on Evan’s concepts or editorial requests. Also, because editorial thought the idea of a speedster running with slipper-like shoes felt awkward, a bit of white canvas was added to cover the back of her feet.

9. At this point we were almost in a victory lap so to speak- the designed seemed finalised, beyond the fact we still couldn’t decide between giving her a ponytail or spiked hair. I made a page with various suggestions on the spiked hair that were more to my taste, primarily based on old school anime hairdos like Cutie Honey’s or Vegeta’s; You can see on the twitter thread and Evan’s pages that we were playing with Surge not having the black mark, in case it felt too drastic, and giving her a dark green one instead.

10. BUT THEN! Evan asked if I was ok with her doing some more clothing suggestions, which of course I was; and she did these, inspired by Kingdom Hearts’ Sora. I fell in love- she’d managed to get the silhouette right, back with the baggy legs I wanted in the start! I quickly changed everything to fit this new silhouette and everyone agreed to go with it.

11. Oh boy, these sketches.

First off, a design was picked from the short spiked hair options- seems to be H3, IIRC. We were also still unsure on whether to do black or green marks, so I did both for both designs- you can check the twitter thread for more.

So. Why did I draw her beating the crap out of Sonic? Well, I can tell you first off, not because anyone asked me. See, here’s the train of thought to me:

a. I wanted her to have a very brutal fighting style, but my job was just designing her, doing a turnaround. So I wanted to explore some of her fighting moves in a quick poses sheet for other artists to get what I was imagining in terms of her style and body language.

b. I wanted her design to fit next to Sonic, so I was always comparing her next to Sonic, Tails, etc, but also wanted to make some sketches of her interacting with them just to see if they seemed cohesive and like they were in the same world.

c. I was curious if these fighting movements I had in mind could work with the proportions of a Sonic character, and for that matter, if someone being in the receiving end of said moves could also be drawn with those proportions. After all, near every character in the book has these proportions- what’d be the point of making sure she can be drawn kicking if I can’t make sure it’s also easy to draw someone being kicked?

Putting it all together, it made sense to me to just kill three birds with one stone- test the fighting poses and the hurt poses using Surge and Sonic, which’d also make them interacting and serve as a rough guide to whether they looked cohesive.

This was all still very new to me, the process of designing Kip was very different. I was under the impression Sega was being shown every one of these sketches, and I wanted to see their reaction to this- if they said immediately “no, too violent, and especially not her doing this to Sonic”, we’d immediately know the limits we could take her to. As it happens these weren’t being sent to Sega yet though, as far as I know, and the ones that DID get sent, I edited Sonic out, and there was no objection from them regarding any poses; I expect it’ll be a context thing instead, where it’ll be in each story that they object or not to what she does.

That’s it. Seriously, there’s no other meaning to this. I’ve seen people say this was an attempt to make her badass by specifically beating Sonic, or that Sonic deserves it, or that she’s beating him while he’s unconscious and on the floor, and just... please, no. There really is no meaning here beyond “a character interacting with a design”. I’ve seen people suggest I should’ve used Egg Pawns instead, but Egg Pawns don’t have the default proportions of a rando character; and just, yeah, dunno people, have some good faith please. I like Sonic, I don’t want to go “hahaha character I designed better than lame old Sonic” lol.

Alright, moving on.

12. And so we reach the point where we actually finally sent stuff to Sega. I did a turnaround and polished the poses a bit, for both the ponytail and spiky hair versions, and we finally dropped the green marks rather than black. You see, we’d reached the end of the line of all we could design before sending it to Sega for feedback, and still hadn’t decided between ponytail or spikes, so I just did both and we left it for Sega to choose.

You can check the twitter thread for the concept A poses or B turnaround, but also both of them are unfinished designs so don’t use them as reference.

Anyway yeah, you can also see clearly that I edited Sonic away in the references- I was satisfied Surge was already fitting enough with Sonic design-wise and that the last few steps would be down to Sega’s feedback, so there was no need for distractions by having Sonic in the model sheet that’d later be made public (I was, of course, too naïve and didn’t think they’d use the earlier one, that I intended to be seen only by us and later in a post like this where I could explain the context, in marketing, but of course they did- it was guaranteed to generate buzz lol).

After this, Sega picked the ponytail option obviously, and it was just a matter of some back and forth to finish details. They felt the turtleneck didn’t match her attitude, but without it her torso just felt like it was black rather than a shirt, so I added the ripped shoulders based on Anton Veruca from the old manga; I’d given her a long split tail so we could draw electricity arcing between the two bits, but Sega pointed Tenrecs don’t have tails or have short ones, so it got reduced. Sega felt the shoes needed some black detailing to match the hands, so I just used literally the suggestion doodle they sent; including reducing the shoe’s... tongue, that’s how it’s called, right? So we could easily see her ankle. Finally Sega wanted more detail in the pants, so we ended up with the Bruce Lee-esque stripe; and after way too long, I finally realised I could just use the same yellow that Evan was using for Kit rather than using the same yellow as Tails, hence the final change to giving her a more fluorescent yellow. Sega also asked us to design something else regarding her but shhhhh that’s the bit I hid in the final sheet I posted publicly ;)

Hope this was a fun read for people! Feel free to ask follow up questions, if I can I’ll answer.

#ppdpplart #idw sonic #surge the tenrec

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