The Complete Sonic Art Style Retrospective

hey everyone chamix here drawing has been a personal hobby of mine for as long as i can remember and wouldn't you guess it sonic is one of the main things that got me into it in the first place i just remember using the sonic mega collections gallery mode to look at all the countless amounts of illustrations for hours upon hours zooming in and analyzing all the tiny details jesus christ dude what the i would often try replicating a lot of this art myself and eventually learn how to draw most of the characters on my own and from memory but something i noticed almost right away was just how many styles there were for the art of sonic the hedgehog there were some that gave sonic a sort of mohawk some that seem more hand-drawn than others and then some that were done in complete 3d oh yeah and then there's this thing i didn't realize it at the time but with almost every style there was a unique artist to go along with it and let me tell you the pure amount of artists to work on the series is pretty dang impressive today i want to go in depth in the history of sonic art the individual artist along with the key characteristics of each one and how the styles have changed or haven't changed over the years yeah you'll see what i mean by that last one a little bit later on i won't be including every single style as there are just way too many but i'll be sure to get all of the really prominent ones and also touch up on some of the obscure ones as well so with all that out of the way let's get started because we have a lot to cover before we officially kick things off i'd like to say this video is proudly sponsored by skillshare i personally do a lot of digital art and recently i've been dipping my toes in 3d modeling and animation this kind of stuff can be really daunting to figure out on your own and back when i first started i would have killed for something as convenient as a skillshare class to help ease me in and show me the ropes with skillshare you can join among thousands of online classes to hone in on that particular skill you've been looking to improve upon thinking about finally starting your journey into animation how about perfecting your illustration techniques there are great classes for all types of skills with great opportunities for personal growth like this one by gabrielle piccolo for learning and improving character illustrations classes like these are great for learning techniques you may never have known about from a lot of very talented teachers skillshare is all about learning with new classes launching all the time the first 1 000 of my subscribers to use the link in the description will get a free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity so take the first steps to finally learning the things you've always wanted to learn today before sonic was sonic he was merely an idea in somebody's noggin and that man was albert einstein but during that time he was going by naoto oshima and eventually with the help of pencil and paper this idea was brought to life in the form of this little guy it does go a bit farther back than this as sonic was originally going to be a character named feels the rabbit but hey let's not get too distracted here as you can see from his original concept art sonic's quills were a lot thinner and plentiful compared to the final design truthfully it resembles a real hitch hog a little bit more but i'm glad they changed it into the three bigger spikes for the final design these illustrations were merely pieces of concept art in terms of the medium used these all seem to have been done with pencil and paper along with some sort of colored pencil or crayon just to get the rough idea of the character's color scheme this type of art usually tends to be pretty messy and unfinished looking by nature concept artists are responsible for coming up with the good ideas but in order to get there it takes a lot of trial and error meaning a lot of designing scrapping redesigning going back to the drawing board literally revising and eventually finalizing after all it would be pretty silly to do an entirely finished drawing for something you might just end up scrapping shortly after totally not speaking from personal experience already we can see the western cartoon influence on this character it's been stated that sonic's design was heavily inspired by felix the cat and mickey mouse it's really cool to see the origins of sonic because you can still completely tell it's him even though his concept design differs just a bit after tweaking the concept design based on feedback and deeper consideration this is the first official finalized design of sonic the hedgehog this design is the one that was utilized for most of the early classic era the illustrations used in the game's promo and box art were all done by akira watanabe so let's talk about some of the key features of his style first of all these illustrations are all extremely clean everything from the shapes the colors the proportions i can't really decide if these pieces were done digitally or traditionally though my gut tells me that it could be digital because of how clean it is but considering these were done in 1991 it makes me really second guess myself on that either way there's a lot of airbrush shading around the edges of most of the shapes the colors on sonic himself aren't super vibrant here actually you'll notice that they're decently muted another thing to notice is the complete lack of line art that just means that there's no outline around the shapes when it comes to sonic's proportions he's a lot more stubbier in this era compared to later ones as we'll see in a bit his torso is a lot rounder almost a perfect sphere his limbs and spines are a lot shorter and his nose is more bean shaped his eyes are also black you can see the smallest amount of brown highlight towards the bottom sometimes though sonic's poses in akira watanabe's art tends to be decently static you got some cool ones like in the japanese box art for sonic spinball but for the most part he's pretty much just standing there waving a finger or three however there was a collection of art released in the form of calendars of all things that feature a ton of some of the best classic era artwork with some really interesting and dynamic poses and composition these illustrations were done by both naoto oshima and osamu mutto i couldn't dig up too much information on who did what but my guess is that naoto oshima sketched out the compositions and osamu mutto rendered them just by looking at some of osamu mutto's other works it's pretty easy to see the similarities in the shading and rendering techniques these pieces are so vibrant and seeing sonic in these huge colorful backgrounds with all sorts of fun props is really refreshing as a pretty good majority of his previous illustrations feature him in pretty abstract backgrounds these calendar illustrations are seriously some of my favorites of all time there's another style that despite only really being used once is probably one of the most respected sonic styles of all time it isn't as popular as some of the others but man it's a cult favorite i'm of course talking about sonic cd specifically the animations for the intro and outro while the box art and a lot of the other promotional art is illustrated in the classic jp style the animations utilize a very sharp and stylish anime art style the animation studio responsible studio junio spent four painstaking months animating these incredible scenes apparently on extremely low wages some of the members of this team also worked on dragon ball which is always a plus for me and you can really tell because the action poses are pure 10 out of 10's the dynamic poses the way his spike sticks straight up the fluidity and his movement it seriously gives me goosebumps every single time i watch him go on top of this sonic is just so expressive here the way he's got one brow higher up than the other his small but confident smile the pure look of determination on his face this is just such an accurate depiction of the character i also think these animations might be the most masterful display of sonic's pure speed there's just no other piece of media that has given sonic a sense of speed on this level it's in its own ballpark by a lot this is honestly one of the single most graceful pieces of animation i've ever seen in my life and i'm not even exaggerating if only the game was this cool now i'm joking sonic cd is pretty cool when the level design doesn't seem randomly generated that is so remember the classic jp design that we were talking about yeah that wasn't exactly a thing in america you see sega really wanted sonic to appeal to the west and in order to do this they completely re-stylized him into a more looney tunes-esque style so greg martin an amazingly talented artist responsible for a ton of video game box art from the 80s and 90s among other fantastic cartoonist work localized sonic's designed to appeal more to western audiences almost opposite of the japanese design sonic is kind of flabby looking what i mean by this is that his poses are a lot more loose looking while the classic jp poses looked a bit more clean and sturdy there's also a ton of curves and pudgy bits all throughout his design which plays a huge role in this flabby kind of structure unlike the japanese design the greg martin design has some thick line art separating each of the shapes but one aspect that's similar is that there's a ton of shading done by airbrush i'd say though that the contrast is much more harsh here and the colors are way more vibrant than the muted ones from the jp design i know a lot of people really dislike this design and maybe this is just nostalgia speaking but i have a really soft spot for the greg martin sonic design it's super reminiscent of old school cartoons and i've always been a fan of this kind of exaggerated line work i don't know maybe you disagree but i personally think it has a lot of character these illustrations are just iconic and they ooze at american 90s coolness sadly greg martin passed away in 2013 but his artwork is still appreciated by a lot of people myself included while we're still talking about the western design of sonic there's a couple of other western sonic iterations i want to talk about the first is from the sonic cartoons made by deke entertainment these include sonic set am the adventures of sonic the hedgehog and sonic underground luckily they all share a very similar art style as they were created by the same animation studio so we can just lump these all together right off the bat you can tell that these were all heavily inspired by the greg martin design rather than the japanese design sonic's got his american styled mohawk he's a bit pudgy and the style of line art is very western but compared to the full-fledged greg martin illustrations they're obviously a lot more simplified to be better suited for animation mostly in the shading department the main difference comes from the eyes i think sonic is just so snarky and rude looking in these cartoons for some reason it's kind of great actually because in some of these cartoons sonic is an absolute brat it makes for some pretty decent comedy the pupils are also considerably smaller which makes him look a little bit less innocent i think the second western iteration of sonic comes from the comics and when i say iteration i actually mean iterations plural the comics have been around for just as long as sonic himself and there have been so many artists on board over the years talking about every single one could fill its own multi-part video so i'll just pick three of some of the most notable ones the first one is the notorious ten penders a name that strikes fear into the hearts of many sonic fans for those of you that don't know there was this whole legal battle between henders and sega about ownership of certain characters in the archi comics created by penders due to negligence on sega's part penders actually won this lawsuit and now has the rights to a ton of archie characters i won't get into the nitty-gritty of it here but maybe one day i can make a more dedicated discussion about it tldr this lawsuit forced certain characters to be killed off and eventually caused a reboot to the entire archie comics series when it comes to his art ken pender's artwork is special i don't want to completely knock it because the guy has some genuinely good pieces and his technique can be pretty dang good at times but overall i kind of dislike the way he draws most characters proportions are much too human-like and the eyes are way too big for my tastes some of his artwork is also very blurry like instead of using an airbrush tool to shade he kind of just blurs colors together which makes everything look smudgy the next artist i want to talk about is patrick spaziante aka spazz this is my personal favorite comic artist he is so good at emulating almost any style whether it be the classic jp style the adventure style or even the sonic x style don't worry these are all styles i'll be talking about shortly so stay tuned his own style which is what i'll mainly be talking about is absolutely insane and when i mentioned how i would use the gallery mode in sonic mega collection to practice drawing spazz's art was always one of the main ones i would gravitate towards he boasts an incredible amount of detail in almost all of his illustrations proportionally sonic is a tad lanky but i think he makes it work he tends to draw the spines really long which is something that i actually personally love and he always draws hands in really dynamic ways something i always really appreciated because i usually suck at drawing hands his sense of composition and poses just make each piece pop out so much the last comic artist i want to mention is tracy yardley who has been extremely prominent in a lot of the more modern archie and idw comics this might be kind of an unpopular opinion but i'm not a huge fan of the style now i don't want to be too disrespectful because i think he's done an amazing job for the series but i personally find his art to be a bit too basic i'm not saying that he isn't capable of drawing more detailed pieces but i think his style lacks a lot of depth in certain aspects first the variety in his line art doesn't really seem to have much rhyme or reason and characters have the bare minimum amount of details i think this is due to the line art generally being very thick giving a lot less room on the inside of the characters to draw smaller details shapes are also kind of blocky as he uses a lot of boxy angles on things like sonic's brows his fingers and his joints something that a lot of other artists who have drawn the character tend to round out i'm probably pissing off a lot of sonic comic fans with this opinion and i'll accept that i'm probably in the minority on this one so i'll just stop here while i'm ahead as i mentioned there's a ton of other styles but i'm unfortunately going to have to cut it short here maybe i'll do an entirely separate video on this topic alone in the future so i can go much more in depth the sonic series would eventually go on to utilize new technology and create 3d renders for a lot of their main characters yeah before anyone comments even 3d models are considered art and have their own style to them that i'll be talking about throughout the rest of this video alongside of the 2d illustrations i won't really be talking about the in-game models though just the high-quality 3d renders used for the box arts and promotional materials 3d renders can be seen as early as the sonic 3 title screen as well as sonic and knuckles and sonic 3d blast these models are pretty similar but definitely get refined a bit as the games go on to be brutally honest the sonic design is a bit rough it looks like he's made out of very basic stock geometry you'd find in any 3d modeling software he's got a perfect sphere for a head half a cone for his ears rounded cylinders for his fingers it isn't exactly anything too intricate these were all also rendered into 16-bit color so the colors are pretty chunky so i'm being kind of harsh right now but 3d art was really new during this time so i can definitely cut them a bit of slack a lot of other 3d renders at this time were in a pretty similar boat anyways but in terms of early 3d renders i'd say sonic r was the first game to have a pretty good looking one of the classic design he looks like he was crafted without using basic stock shapes and he has a pretty natural looking pose as well i'm a pretty big fan of the renders used in the title screen for sonic r actually they all look really great the sega saturn was a pretty sad place for sonic games overall there were three games but none of which were mainline releases there was sonic 3d blast a spin-off isometric platformer created by traveler's tales sonic r a spin-off racing game utilizing full 3d also made by traveler's tales and finally sonic jam a compilation of the classic games for the saturn no new games created by sonic team themselves but one positive thing to come from this era of games was the artwork even though these games were spin-offs that didn't stop sega from having some high quality artwork created for them up until this point sonic's poses have been a bit undynamic as i mentioned earlier a lot of the compositions for the game box are just have sonic kind of standing there they'd mix it up though every once in a while by having sonic point a different amount of fingers up that was usually the extent of the variety but this is where the poses and line art started to be experimented with and i think a lot of people really sleep on this era the man to be credited with this wonderful work is satoshi okano the first game he was on sonic 3d blast has some of my favorite artwork from the entire series this style is so experimental and the characters are really expressive and noodly here something that surprisingly hasn't been fully taken advantage of up until this point after all the characters are heavily inspired by western rubber hose cartoons so it always made sense to me that they should have put them in these exaggerated poses besides the poses my other favorite aspect is the varying weight in line art you have some lines that are mega thick and some that are really thin this paired along with the flat colors makes each piece seem very pop-arty without counting the 3d renders obviously this is where the 2d illustrations become very digital looking you can definitely tell that this wasn't done with pencil and paper but satoshi okano would use a more similar style to the classic japanese sonic design for sonic jam and sonic r the two games releasing after 3d blast you can see the airbrushed shading and super clean shapes just like the classic jp design uses but the biggest difference is that the poses are so much more dynamic than anything you'd find earlier this entire era is the point where a certain characteristic that i absolutely love comes into play dubbed by me the hot dog shoes sonic and friends all have really long almost sock-like shoes and i absolutely love them it's almost like a perpetual smear frame on sonic's shoes which make him look so nimble on his feet this is also where sonic's spines become a bit longer again something that i personally prefer alright ladies and gentlemen time for me to gush about my absolute favorite era of sonic artwork i am 100 biased towards this style no shame if you've seen the thumbnails for almost any of my videos you probably already know exactly where i'm going with this sonic adventure 1 and 2 baby heavily adapting from the work of satoshi okano yuji uekawa would go on to create in my opinion the most versatile and dynamic iterations of our beloved characters to date yeah one thing i never really see anyone talk about is how the 3d blast artwork really got the ball rolling for the style used in adventure 1. adventure 1 and 2 has some of my favorite illustrations from the series of all time the style differs a bit between adventure 1 and 2 so let's break it down first off we gotta mention the elephant in the room sonic's core character design went through a bit of change his limbs and spines are longer his eyes are green and his attitude is a lot more interface with the enormous personality exuding from his poses alone adventure 1 uses much more lucy noodly poses and cranks the hot dog shoe levels to 11. all of sonic's poses and these illustrations have such amazing flow the lineart kind of just has your eyes doing circles around the piece which is fitting for a hedgehog that can curl up into a ball and spin around at mock speeds the weight of the line art isn't as varied as satoshi okano's but it's still very dynamic and bold uekawa does this amazing technique with his line art where he smooths out any harsh edges created from perpendicular intersecting lines giving it a very smooth feel that helps with the compositional flow of each piece the shading uses a lot of airbrushes not in a dissimilar way to the classic japanese style edges have a very harsh highlight to them with a little bit of gradient and underneath you can see a really dark airbrushed shadow that just complements the highlight so well the contrast between the highlight and shadow makes the colors absolutely pop almost everything is curved there aren't really any harsh bends in anything except for the ends of the spines obviously for sonic adventure 2 the poses are a bit less dynamic sonic doesn't contort himself as much and the rubber hose style has been cranked down quite a bit and unfortunately the hot dog shoes aren't as dramatic here for the illustrations without the famous soap shoes they rounded off the tips of sonic's regular shoes fun fact eventually uakawa had to redraw most of sonic's illustrations to include the soap shoes after sega signed their sponsorship deal as much as i love the soap shoes they don't give that nimble feeling that sonic's hot dog shoes did don't get me wrong they're red as hell but it's a lot more difficult to draw them dynamically than his original shoes another difference is that sonic's torso is much more slim there's something about sonic's puffed out chess from adventure 1 that just screamed confidence sometimes his slimmed down torso makes it seem like he's slouched i'm guessing this was to make him look a bit more laid back also his spines aren't as long and don't curl down as much something i really enjoyed from adventure 1. one thing that uekawa adds to his drawings from adventure 2 are these solid shadows it definitely adds another layer of depth to his pieces but one thing i can't help but notice that takes away from this depth comes from the less saturated colors compared to adventure 1 i think these colors are a tiny bit more muted uh kawa's work didn't end with the adventure games his style would slowly evolve becoming a lot more edged rather than round you can see the slow progression from the advanced games all the way to sonic rush adventure because unfortunately that was the last game to utilize his artwork for the primary promotional material however he's still making new art for the series all the time which i believe makes him the longest and most consistent artist for the series after rush adventure he started experimenting with more sketchy styles and also pretty interesting color effects as seen in his monthly sonic channel artwork more recently his style has become extremely angular which is almost the complete opposite philosophy from the first adventure game although i prefer his earlier work from adventure 1 and 2 i still really appreciate this part and would totally love to see his newer style featured in a future game sonic would eventually get an anime adaptation in sonic x in the early 2000's animated by tms entertainment a pretty famous anime studio the series would adapt uikawa style into a more digestible animatable form you can see that sonic's design is very similar to that of the adventure games but it makes use of clear hard cut cell shading rather than the frequent airbrush effects used in uaekawa's art for time saving purposes not so dissimilar to the deek sonic cartoons after all with animation you gotta draw and color these characters tens of thousands of times so simplifying the character is a necessity of the medium i think they did a really good job with the sonic x designs though the quality of animation can definitely vary but when it's good it's good sonic heroes is the first game to basically completely stray away from 2d illustrations sonic teams seem to be very confident with their 3d capabilities at this point the box art is in complete 3d all of our character portraits are in 3d and we have a bunch of 3d rendered cutscenes throughout the game but if i'm being honest the renders can be a bit off at times sonic is really yellow for some reason but it's mostly just a lighting thing i think other than that sonic usually looks pretty good when stationary there's a few renders that are absolutely awesome like this one but the main issues show up during the cgi cutscenes i'm pretty sure it's just the animations but the characters can be a bit rough in motion the way their faces are animated can be kind of weird and the poses can be a bit awkward overall sonic heroes tried pushing their 3d capabilities to new heights and they succeeded in some aspects but failed in others i just don't think that their technology was there yet at the time luckily while sonic heroes was focusing on 3d art we had another game released within the same month that had a large focus on 2d art so we can get the best of both worlds and let me tell you this style is so underrated only ever used for one game the sonic battle artwork is yet another adaptation of the uekawa style but this time being extremely edgy and sharp using only a series of completely straight lines to create the line art overall it's more simple but amazingly stylized and i love it it's funny because the artist hisanobu kometani had done work on trading cards for other franchises and it looks nothing like his work in sonic battle it seems that he really went out of his comfort zone for this game but it really paid off shadow the hedgehog is a game that reuses a lot of assets from sonic heroes however for the promotional renders and cgi cutscenes they really stepped their game up now i believe this game has the first iteration of what i'll be calling the modern sonic model i'll be talking about this in great detail a bit later on so just keep a note about this point for now and shadow the hedgehog the models the animations and the lighting are such a huge step up from sonic heroes despite being in such a ridiculous spin-off game the fact that they went all out for this is just kind of hilarious to me and this game is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine for those reasons but anyways i think this is the first game to utilize 3d renders and cgi cutscenes exceptionally well i'm gonna be completely honest i think this is some of the best lighting used throughout the entire series and this game was from 2005 similar to sonic heroes there aren't really any 2d illustrations used for any of the promotional material just these 3d renders the only real issue i have with them is that sometimes shadow's pupils are really wide but overall the cg used in this game is phenomenal and the animations are amazing like sonic battle sonic riders also has another amazing art style that was only used once this should be a crime this style is super sketchy and not afraid to be gritty or messy definitely not a bad thing i think there's a time and place for this kind of messier style and this is definitely it it utilizes this awesome style of shading where things that are slightly in the background are completely obscured by shadows and hatched out with diagonal lines these character portraits were created by artist hideyaki moria and his art was adapted into the anime-styled opening for this game this intro was produced by production ig an anime studio specializing in video game openings for example they also did the opening for tales of symphonia i absolutely love this art style and i'd love to see it come back with another proper sequel to sonic riders which is an amazing game in itself sonico 6 would continue the legacy of the amazing cgi work shadow the hedgehog gave us with its plethora of promotional material character renders and beautifully animated cgi cutscenes at this point it really seemed like the series had just really given up on using 2d illustrations for its primary art style the cg cutscenes in 06 can be a bit sus but the opening and ending cutscenes especially are utterly beautiful the renders for all of the character portraits the box art and the other promotional materials are absolutely stunning these are all completely new assets and were only ever used for this one game sonic shadow and silver standing next to each other is just so awesome to see the poses show a lot of character the expressions give their faces a ton of life and the lighting really shows how this was really supposed to be the next gen sonic experience the render for the box art is especially cool sonic running towards the camera the beautiful landscapes in the background man i just love these renders and the look of each character so much unfortunately 06 was kind of the last time that sonic team would develop completely new and exclusive assets for their mainline games i'd like to finally talk about the next iteration of sonic which has been utilized for over an entire decade and a half it's the most prominent style for sonic of all time i talked about it for just a second in the shadow the hedgehog portion of this video but since its appearance was extremely brief and especially because he wasn't even the star of the show in that game i wanted to save talking about it until now sonic and the secret rings as far as i'm aware is the first game to completely put the spotlight on the quote-unquote modern sonic model and i'm specifically talking about the high quality model used in promotional renders and cgi render cutscenes like i mentioned i believe this model was first used back during shadow the hedgehog but only for a brief moment during the intro cutscene and for a single render for the instruction manual the biggest giveaways that these are the same model are the socks and glove cuffs as they have this particular fold in it that's really easy to spot on all the other modern renders the inner ear which is kind of rounded and the crease in between his eyes which is essentially just a line that goes straight up without much definition so here's the thing about this model it isn't bad but man has it overstayed its welcome now i'm not implying that this modern sonic model has gone unchanged but it's always been used for at least a base for the final design in almost every single sonic game to come out since some aspects slightly change like the length of his limbs and spines or the color of his fur but the essence of this model is always still there there is one thing that i do think is absolutely bad though this model has essentially killed any chance for unique and experimental 2d or 3d artwork whether that be for the box art character portraits or promotional material this model is just used absolutely everywhere with extremely minimal alteration and the way it's stylized is basically the exact same in every game just to really put it into perspective this model is used in sonic and the secret rings the mario and sonic at the olympic games series sonic rivals 2 sonic unleashed sonic and the black knight sonic 4 episode 1 and 2 sonic free riders sonic colors sonic generations all of the sonic card racing games sonic lost world and sonic forces and even with this next sonic game the render being teased is this same modern sonic model that's almost 15 years straight of using this same modern sonic model for the franchise's promotional material so likewise the sheer exposure i've had to this model over the period of 15 years or so has made me realize a ton of little details that i really dislike sonic's forehead is kind of huge the color in his eyes are very flat his shoes look like they're made of metal his eyes are way too separated most of the time his spines look like torpedoes sometimes and his mouth has this very tiny underlip that drives me insane alright rant over my main point is that i would really really love sonic team to make a new base for the sonic model i really want to see them experiment again with sonic's art style because i've grown so tired of the same model being used for essentially everything this model has gone completely stale in my opinion you can update the lighting all you want but it doesn't change the fact that we've been looking at the same exact face for an entire decade and a half luckily there's a few exceptions to this modern sonic model curse the first one being sonic boom a reboot spin-off series created by western developers that takes sonic in a pretty different direction i distinctly remember the day they revealed these designs and the internet was a war zone people were so upset because each of the main characters went through a slightly controversial redesign now i know i just said how i'd love for sonic team to change the look of these characters but it also has to be good and faithful to sonic's original design i don't just want change for the sake of change so this redesign consisted of making characters limbs more lanky making knuckles buff slapping on a ton of accessories and oh yeah making sonic's arms blue personally i'm not a huge fan of this style if it wasn't already obvious i think the sports tape is kind of unnecessary and the extra accessories are just distractions to the otherwise already perfectly designed characters at the very least these are completely unique models so props to the dev team for not just reusing the modern sonic model but like i said i prefer the design to be more faithful to the original the only other real diversion from the modern sonic model comes from sonic mania sonic mania is interesting because it kind of revives two different styles from the classic era of sonic the style used for the intro and the sonic mania adventure shorts are throwbacks to sonic cd of all things nice the artist tyson hess combines the style of sonic cd with a little bit of new age cartoon style while i still personally prefer the original cd designs i think tyson does a really great job with putting his own spin on the classic cd style the artist for the promotional art tom frye emulates the clean look of the classic jp era of sonic and he absolutely nails the style down to almost every detail it's really interesting to see how western artists were able to take over for sonic mania and give us something refreshing in terms of style even if it was something borrowed from the past it had been a while since these styles were used so i think people were actually really welcoming towards them and on top of that it's so refreshing to see a sonic game without the modern sonic model plastered on top of it okay there's one more diversion from the modern sonic model but it's not from any video game we're moving on to the last and most recent style of sonic the sonic movie design first you know i gotta talk about that abomination that was the initial design this design is just hilarious to me i love it purely for the uproard cause in and outside of the community something about him just triggers my fight-or-flight response his human-like eyes his human-like teeth his human-like fingers man why would anyone approve of this this is dipping into uncanny valley levels of body horror the entire internet collectively slammed dunked this design into oblivion and eventually the overwhelming negative feedback led the production team to reconsider the entire design luckily our hero tyson hess was responsible for the great redesign that ended up being used in the final movie sonic is much more friendlier looking and a lot truer to his video game counterpart tyson hess did a fantastic job at coming up with a great in-between for what the original movie design was going for and the video game's style it's like the perfect balance of realism and cartoon his eyes are a lot bigger and cartoonish he wears gloves like in the original games and overall he's less human-like leaving that weird uncanny valley territory the first design was in but man i'm not gonna lie i would still love to see a version of this movie with the original design sonic the hedgehog movie dx director's cut that was a lot of sonics and throughout his 30 years of existence he's had a lot of different art styles created by a lot of different talented artists i really do think that there's a style out there for everyone whether it be the classic jp style the american design the uikawa design or even the modern renders the pure amount of art styles really does show how versatile this character is and i didn't even talk about all of them i'm hoping sonic team lets more artists try their hand at new styles in the future it's been a bit stale lately and i know i and many others would love to see sonic team let more experimental styles be tried out because who knows maybe the best sonic design is yet to be created hey everyone thank you so much for making it to the end of this video smash that like button if you liked it and subscribe for more content similar to this i upload on a new weekly basis in the comments below let me know your favorite art style for sonic the hedgehog and to take that discussion even further make sure to join the community discord the link to that will be in the description and finally i'd love to give a huge shout out to my channel backers you guys absolutely rock and are the number one reason i'm able to keep doing this whole youtube thing on a weekly basis if you'd also like to directly support my channel for only two dollars press the join button beneath this video or go to the description and press the channel membership link you also get a bunch of cool perks so make sure to check it out for more information and with all that out of the way i hope everyone has a fantastic day peace [Music] [Music]

Channel: chaomix

Views: 362,653

Keywords: sonic, sonic the hedgehog, sonic art, sonic fan art, sonic adventure, sonic adventure 2, sonic adventure 3, sonic adventure remakes, sonic adventure 2021, sonic news, sonic 2021, sonic anniversary, sonic 2022, sonic archie comics, sonic comics, sonic battle, sonic 06, sonic movie, sonic movie 2, chaomix, sonic art style, sonic art style retrospective, sonic art analysis, sonic art review, classic sonic, how to draw sonic, how to draw sonic the hedgehog

Id: njOi8Q0fxa4

Length: 34min 26sec (2066 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021