Hello, I'm making this post asking for help in finding a piece of lost media of Kieran Gates' (also known as Thegatestormer) Sonic Adventure Art tutorial he made in 2012. It was mentioned to me by JaxTH that this tutorial was given out physically at Summer of Sonic 2012. I stumbled upon it randomly after trying to find more of Kieran Gates' art pieces, I found some old ones but not all of them. Then I found out that he had a Deviantart account that is not sadly deleted, so I decided to look at it via Wayback Machine, and then I saw that he made a tutorial showing how to draw in Uekawa's artstyle. I tried downloading it but the download links are dead, and they were not archived. I did luckily find the 2nd part of the tutorial by googling the name of the tutorial, and that's where I found it: https://vdocuments.mx/sonic-adventure-art-tutorial-part-02.html It seems that Kieran uploaded it on this site, if you click the profile name you can also find his resume, so it is probably him. But the 1st part of the tutorial is missing. I've tried asking few people that left a comment in archived page of the Deviantart post of said tutorial, but only two of them responded and none of them have it. One of them didn't even remember it. I searched in many places as well, I searched Reddit, Sonic Retro, Twitter, Summer of Sonic 2012, but nothing. I sent Kieran an email but he didn't respond, so I tagged him on Twitter and he responded saying that he does not have it anymore and to not really pay attention to it because he was young when he made it. I can understand why he's saying it, but it would still be very cool to acquire the first part of the tutorial for archive purposes, and perhaps it could still be useful despite better methods of drawing in Uekawa's style being out there. I'd appreciate any help I can get.
Hey I actually have part 1 of this tutorial. Here is an Imgur album I made compiling all the pages: https://imgur.com/a/5IHKoHU I hope this is what you were looking for and that your search is over. They were saved as [.jpg] images so they are sadly not in the best quality but it’s either that or not having them at all. I saved all the pages such a long time ago that I don’t even remember where I got them at this point. It was during the time of Mania’s release as I was trying to find many interesting things about the staff involved with the game given that most of them had a background in the fan community. I saved both part 1 and 2 of this tutorial Kieran made since I thought it was a great insight into emulating Uekawa’s art style. Kieran had worked on the 2016 fan game titled “Big's Big Fishing Adventure 3” providing artwork to the game and I think that was another factor as to why I saved his tutorial as that fan game really showed how well he could replicate the Adventure artstyle. https://twitter.com/TheGatestormer/status/798253397099024385 https://archive.vn/8Nybn I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that before Kieran Gates worked on Mania one of his pieces of fan art appeared in Sonic and the Black Knight as he was one of the many winners of a contest Sega held where fans could submit art to them and the ones that they liked would appear in the game’s fan art gallery. I personally found out about this in a tweet someone made directed towards Kieran asking if a certain fan art piece was made by him as they saw it had his name on it and he answered that it was his and that he was 15 years old when he made it: I was watching an old Let's Play of Sonic and the Black Knight that shows off a fanart gallery in the game and...am I right to assume this is you? https://web.archive.org/web/2023101...m/media/EyEntQSWQAAKott?format=jpg&name=large Correct! That is me at 15 https://twitter.com/TheGatestormer/status/1378428903392481280 https://archive.vn/qGN3k Here's two other tweets where he mentions more about it: Mega blast to the past with this! I remember doing this on the family computer in my parents living room. Probably with Photoshop CS or CS2. https://twitter.com/TheGatestormer/status/1378432146445119489 https://archive.vn/y3PR9 10 years since 15 year old me was stressing over the Sonic & The Black Knight art contest. I remember sitting at our Windows XP computer working on this after school...time flies! Anyone else remember when this was going on? https://web.archive.org/web/20220102142152im_/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DkglQC7X0AIy5vg.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/2022010...com/TheGatestormer/status/1029118903665025024
Oh my God... Thank you so much! I really appreciate it! I was right to make a post here. I'm happy that my efforts didn't go to waste. Stritix (from SoaH) mentioned to me that Big's Big Fishing Adventure 3' art was being created with guidance from Sonic Team and that some old style documents were brought out so they could match the artstyle perfectly so I'm guessing he was mentioning Kieran Gates, what a coincedence. Again, thank you so much <3
I've taken the liberty of making a .pdf for you. I've also put the second part in for others who want both. https://files.catbox.moe/p03iko.zip
I actually have the disk that was given out at Summer of Sonic somewhere. I can see this has been solved, but is the disk worth archiving?
Of course. Especially since the Part 1 from YU2 seems to be after he took the .png zips down? People were saying the files were really big back then. Might as well provide scans too if you can.
Very glad to have helped you find what you were looking for. This is a good reminder for everyone to always archive as much as you can on whatever you find interesting on the internet because you never know if it will always be around. I have felt the pain of losing things that are no longer on the internet and they weren’t even archived either. Yes please archive the disk if you do have it. I am actually quite interested to see what other materials that disk may have. If it does have the full tutorial in high quality that would be great to see. We wouldn’t also want to get into a similar situation down the line where someone may be asking about the disk and it becomes close to lost media. It’s better to archive it now than never doing it at all just in case something happens to it.
I've made a page with links to both original PDFs here: https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Adventure_Art_Tutorial Also, an artist page for Kieran here: https://info.sonicretro.org/Kieran_Gates Both are quite barebones, so if anyone has time, I'd appreciate it if these could be updated with some more info about Kieran and his work! The PDFs seem to be original quality and the disk also contained a sample sketch which I've uploaded too. Will look at getting scans of the disk and sleeve when I'm near my scanner! Also, it was a little hard to know what to tag these files as for the wiki. I used template:art but it seems that's just for official art! Template:fanart is quite barebones. Just want to make sure the artist is credited, so help would be appreciated!
I didn't get around to saying it until now but thank you for actually providing the PDFs of both parts of the tutorial from that disk. Now we have part 1 in high quality as well! I suppose something else worth mentioning about Kieran Gates is that he did all the 3D models that were in Sonic Mania. Simon Thomley (Stealth) mentioned this in a tweet here: https://twitter.com/HCStealth/status/894016198517571586 https://archive.ph/6b4qz
