Ryan Bloom
patreon
Artwork: Classic Shadow the Hedgehog (With PSD)
🕑 Added 2020-06-10 15:15:49 +0000 UTCSo, almost ten years ago, I did a piece of artwork for my Sonic Generations video review of Classic-styled Shadow the Hedgehog. It was partially me tracing-over official Sonic artwork (possibly by Kazuyuki Hoshino), but I wanted it to look official.
That artwork has since gone on to be featured in all kinds of bootlegs and reproduction cartridges produced for various Sega Genesis ROM hacks -- everything from "Sonic Megamix" to "Shadow in Sonic the Hedgehog 1." Absolutely none of them asked me for my permission, never gave me any kind of compensation or credit (not even the titular "exposure"). I've never felt comfortable about that, and never will.
Talking it over with some friends the other day, one thing that always bothered me about that Shadow artwork is just how low resolution it was. It was made back in 2011, for a video that wasn't even in HD. The image was barely more than 700 pixels tall. Even if I wanted to use it for anything else, it was kind of too small to bother messing with.
It was also a little sloppy. I was trying to get that Sonic Generations video out as quickly as possible, so I didn't want to spend TOO long on something that would only be on screen for four seconds at most.
So, even though I'm only enabling a new generation of bootleggers, I decided to go back and redo that artwork at full-size print resolution -- 4864x6832, exactly 800% of the original image file. It took me most of yesterday to put together, and taught me a lesson about the limitations of the software I use to render pictures like this.
I don't use Photoshop. I use an old, ancient piece of software called Paintshop Pro 7, released for Windows 98. And when you're dealing with images of this size, PSP7 eventually starts throwing "out of memory" errors at you, because it was never designed to see anything beyond 1gb of available RAM. Producing this image required a degree of layer efficiency I've never had to think about before.
Obviously, the image you see at the top of this post isn't 4864x6832; it's been downsampled to around 37% of that, but that still makes it nearly twice the size of the original image. However, exclusively on Patreon, I have also included the source file in PSD at full resolution. I may not use Photoshop, but PSP7 will save in Photoshop's PSD format. Hopefully it can be opened by modern versions of the software. The PSD has all the layers (around 80 of them) so you can turn off shading, hide the arms, etc. Also, even though I said I had to think about efficiency, it's still not that efficient, with multiple layers being used to shade the same objects. Shadow's left hand alone probably has ten layers total, for example.
For comparison, I've also included the original 2011 version in the second image of this gallery.
