Rare Sonic Art (And restoring it)

CD albums typically come with booklets.

 

Oh, so that's where the photo comes from. Thanks for clearing it up. I have a feeling that the artwork must precede that CD and it was just reused for the booklet, just like the other artworks, though. The big 3 suggests it was originally created for a Sonic 3 ad, or that it was one of the proposed European box arts for the game, likely inspired by the American and European box art for Sonic 2, which had a huge 2.

If you click on More Images, you can see scans of the booklet included, which has that artwork in one of the pages.

And yeah, that mouth always baffled me. They must have thought it made him look unique or something. I was annoyed that it even carried over to Fleetway, although maybe I should be grateful they didn't use the conjoined eyes...

 

Since this is actually an art topic:

I've been making enemy pages on the Sonic Retro wiki more "presentable", and I noticed our set of Sonic CD art is unusually awful:

Category:Artwork of Sonic the Hedgehog CD enemies

I can imagine these were originally cropped out of the Japanese Mega-CD manual. But our scan of that is of pretty poor quality (i.e too bad to use for this purpose) and there doesn't seem to be any obvious better versions out there.


Can we source out any better versions? And just as important, can we find official art for the remaining badniks that aren't in the manual? Do they even exist?? Question marks???

 

I'm not 100% on this but I feel like some of these badnik pics were uploaded into Sonic Gems Collection's art gallery.

EDIT: Yup, they were uploaded into the Sonic Gems gallery

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLDkXJ5xTyI

(Go to the 1:02 mark). All 12 badniks shown there are in the gallery, but no extra ones, those ones may just not exist. But if someone can dump the files from Gems Collection then I imagine they'd be of higher quality than the current scans.

 

Actually, those enemy pics come from the help file that comes with the original PC Sonic CD port. And yeah, we need better scans of the Japanese manual.

 

It scares me that Retro hadn't grabbed these sooner - there's Chaotix art in there as well that we could use.

 

Doesn't Gems Collection also have manuals for the games included? We may be able to find better manual scans there as well.

 

Art for the "blaster" version of Poh-Bee exists: http://info.sonicretro.org/images/e/ee/Beep071993scd.jpg

 

I question the validity of this -- the blast itself appears to just be an upscaled sprite, so who's to say they didn't also composite the stinger for some reason?

 

Incidentily, I will be posting newly extracted scans from Sonic CD on http://www.videogameartarchive.com in a month or so.

 

A couple of bits found in the newly discovered SEGA Saturn code sampler. First piece is probably by Totoya.

 

https://picclick.co.uk/OriginalPoster-Sonic-The-Hedgehog-Sega-Chaos-TSB-84cm-152972881405.html



Sonic CD 510 prototype shot(s) aside, the bottom right has a logo for (the original) TSB - a British bank.


There's another thing here.
https://picclick.co.uk/Extremely-Rare-SONIC-THE-HEDGEHOG-POSTER-UK-TSB-332587950534.html


TSB Sonic-related charity posters from 1993.




p.s. don't forget those Gems Collection rips

 

33" inches 84cm tall by 23.5" inches 64cm wide ... that's a huge poster...

 

A while ago I found out the high res Sonic Battle artworks that you can easily find around are fan recreations, so I've been since then looking for the official versions of the same artworks. They seem to have been uploaded online at one point, but they're currently kinda lost in time, or so it seems.
I managed to track down some official versions of almost all the artworks, but they have weird issues with colors, some others are lossy jpgs.

A couple of comparisons:
Shadow fan recreation:
http://info.sonicretro.org/images/archive/e/ef/20180316120909%21Shadow_battle.png
Official artwork:
http://info.sonicretro.org/images/7/71/Sb_shadow_1280x1024.jpg
Notice how the eyebrow shadow covers the eye shine in his left eye in the fan recreation. You can spot some more inconsistencies but that's the most obvious one.

Official Cream artwork:
http://info.sonicretro.org/File:Cream_battle.png
Cream fan recreation:
http://info.sonicretro.org/images/archive/f/fa/20180317003033%21Cream_battle.png
I don't even need to tell you why this is different.

Official Cream artwork 2:
http://info.sonicretro.org/images/d/d6/Cream_battle02.png
http://info.sonicretro.org/File:Sb_cream_1280x1024.jpg
Fanmade recreation:
http://info.sonicretro.org/images/archive/d/d6/20180316015342%21Cream_battle02.png
The shadow on the chest ribbon is different.

Now, this is an example of the official version of an artwork with bad colors, it looks like it has something to do with color profiles, but I haven't been able to find one that looks like it should:
http://info.sonicretro.org/File:Battle_Rouge.png

If anybody can get their hands on the official versions or fix the colors in the artworks that need it and send them my way so that I can compare them it would be great!

 

This topic has shown me that some early Sonic art is actually shite and should be forgotten.

They had poor quality control back then.

 

In fact, most graphic material from the 90's are quite bizzarre. That includes every magazine/book cover, specially those that had 'fresh' and 'interesting' on the briefing.

 

Mostly the western art, from what I've seen. SoA and SoE just didn't seem to give a crap. Not that there wasn't any bad Japanese art, but these seemed to be rare cases.

 

I think back then it was more about getting the general jist across, rather than conforming to a set of clearly defined standards. Sonic doesn't even look consistent between the game boxes, nevermind odd bits of merchandise and marketing campaigns. But we didn't notice so much as kids.

Whereas in Japan... I wouldn't be surprised if they just got Naoto Ohshima to draw everything.

 

Found on Twitter:

 

Wow pretty sure I had that bank poster, thanks for sharing!