Turning fan art into physical art, how I spent the spring of 2025

Hello friends. I hope that you are doing well. What have you been up to since my last new update? I was sorely in need of a break this spring, and summer. Work, and family issues had taken a lot out of me in 2024, and the first part of 2025. I needed to step away from blogging in order to recharge my physical, creative, and mental batteries. The break allowed me to explore my art, which I haven’t really gotten into since the start of the pandemic many years ago. Back then I did illustrations in the style of Steve Nazar (RIP), and drew almost 100 different BMX bikes. Just to get my creative spirit back.

I picked up my sketchbook in the spring, just as I was wrapping up my blog run. I had been getting back into comic books. I wanted to see if I could do an illustration of one of my little brother’s favorite characters. Psylocke from the X-Men. Not just any version of the character, but her pink costume look from her time with the British group Excalibur. Her name is Betsy Braddock, and she is the sister of Captain Britain in case you didn’t know. Current fans may not be aware of her earlier look. Most people today know she wears a sexy ninja costume. Yet she originally looked much different. She was a a white woman that wore a soft flowing pink costume. The character had strong psychic powers, which were often presented as pink butterflies in the comic book panels. The psychic blades that she stabs heads with didn’t come until much later. This was when her mind switched bodies with a brain-dead Japanese assassin.

I had fun with the piece, and wanted to try another illustration based on a real person next. This was around the time that the San Diego Comic Con was happening. My family used to attend the event, but it had been years since we had been able to go. This didn’t mean I wasn’t eager to see the updates from the various websites. Joan Xiao is one of the actors I follow on Instagram. I first saw her in the Flash television series as the Rainbow Raider 2.0, and thought she did a great job with the character. She announced that she would be voicing Iron Fist in a Marvel animation. I thought it was wonderful news. I’m always happy to see minority actors get both live action, and voice-over roles. I had no idea what her costume would look like in the Wakanda cartoon, so I created an illustration of a more casual comic book design. I think the drawing came out well.

As the months went on I wanted to take my art to another level. Instead of making illustrations I wanted something tangible. Something physical, something other than a print that I could hold. I got the idea while playing through Sonic Dream Team. The game was one of my favorite Sonic titles in years. It introduced a new version of Dr. Eggman, and a standout hero called Ariem. It made me sad that we would most likely never see action figures based on these great characters.

I’m sure that you’ve read comics, watched movies, or played video games where you wished there were toys, statues, soft goods, and other collectables that you could pick up. I was surprised that to this day publishers never realized there was a fan base that would pay for merchandise of any rare title. Like many of you I always loved toys. In fact as a kid I wanted to be a toy designer. Fast forward a few decades, and I became an illustrator, and educator that still loved collecting. I didn’t know how to model in 3D, and I didn’t own a 3D printer so I knew that I couldn’t design or print my own toys. That didn’t stop me from coming up with the next best thing.

I shopped around to the various printing companies online, watched videos, and read up on how to produce acrylic charms, and standees. I decided to make an acrylic standee for Ariem that would be in scale with my Sonic figure collection. I created a front, and back, as well as a reversible base. I figured as long as I was going through the steps I might as well revisit the illustrations that I made for Metal NiGHTS. So I created fronts, and backs for Metal NiGHTS, Metal Reala, Metal Jackle, Metal Wizeman, and even Nightmare Eggman. I made sure to carefully measure to heights, and proportions of my Sonic 2.5 inch figures. This way when I got the standees made they would be able to fit side-by-side with my collection.

It took me a few weeks to finalize the designs, and a few months to get the order back from China. Needless to say I was very happy with the way they turned out. The colors were really vibrant, and they gave me a sense as to how Sonic Dream Team, and Sonic Superstar toys would have looked if they were real. As I was working on the art, and waiting on the delivery after uploading them to the printer I kept an eye on some overseas auction sites. As you may know I am a fan of Wonder Eggs. This was the first video game theme park created by Namco. Ephemera from the park which ran from 1992-1999 was rare, but does pop up from time to time. It took me years to get a few items from the park, but almost overnight a bunch of rare items turned up in the spring, and early summer of 2025. Thankfully they weren’t pricey. As a theme park fan several of these could be considered “Holy Grail” items. There were a few Wonder Eggs items left to get, but as far as my collection went I was extremely happy with what I had.

I had a lot of fun putting together art for standees. It made me think of what else I could do. I’m going to talk about that in the next blog. I hope to see you back for that. So how did you spend your spring, and summer of 2025? Did you get into any art projects? Tell me about it in the comments section. As always if you enjoyed this blog, and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

Making a Sonic Team fan, final part...

In the previous blog I featured fan art of a Sonic Team character that never was. Selph was a cancelled boss character for the original NiGHTS into dreams… I speculated what the character looked like, and even that the studio turned the character into Chaos for the Sonic Adventure series. It wasn’t the only time I speculated on their characters. Not long ago my kid asked if I had seen Metal NiGHTS. I had never heard of this iteration of my favorite mascot. It turned out that Metal NiGHTS was hidden in Sonic Superstars, along with Metal Tails, Metal Amy, and more. This inspired me to create fan art on what a meeting of the characters would look like.

That illustration launched a creative rush, and I had to capitalize on it. It had been a long time since I've drawn back-to-back pieces in illustrator. I remembered that there was a smaller Mecha NiGHTS that was a hidden asset in the original game. So I absolutely had to put together a family portrait.

Then as long as I was drawing metal versions I figured there should be a Metal Reala as well. There was not a version in Sonic Superstars, but that didn't stop me from drawing it up. Some people call these little guys chibi-versions but technically they are classic Sonic proportions, rather than modern Sonic. Reala was just a hair bigger than NiGHTS in the original game, so even his metal version was a little bigger as well.

As long as I was creating versions of the robots that never existed I thought about the third “brother” from the series. I absolutely had to create an illustration for Metal Jackle. This character was much bigger than NiGHTS in the original game. He was actually about four times the size of the other hooded nightmarens.

I didn’t want to break the scale of the robots I had already drawn, so I simply made Jackle just a hair larger than Reala. I had so much fun creating these illustrations it made me wish that I knew how to create 3D models. I would love to get a 3D printed version of my little robots made. Don’t you think they look cute?

The only other sort of humanoid figure in NiGHTS into dreams... was the final boss named Wizeman. Yet this character didn't really have a body or head. He was more like a floating cloak on a platform. I didn't think it would be possible to make a Metal version of him, until one day I decided to give it a go. I won't be making Metal versions of the other characters because their proportions are already very much in line with the format. The more I look at these illustrations the more I wonder if it would be possible to remake NiGHTS into a game featuring robots that dream of breaking away from the control of Dr. Eggman. What do you think?

I was on an absolute drawing tear so I thought about what other Sonic Team character I would like to bring back. I remembered that Mecha Sonic from Sonic 2 had some great concept art. I thought it would look even better in color. I think this illustration came out great.

I figured as long as I made an illustration of the Mecha Sonic concept art I might as well render the other metal variations. Did you have a favorite metal doppelganger? I really need to get a copy of Sonic Superstars so I can see the various builds.

There was an illustration that I had been dreading for a long time. It was not the Super Pian aka the King of the Nightopians. I absolutely loved that little guy! I had mentioned him previously on the blog. He was a rare character that you could unlock in the original NiGHTS into dreams… The king would fly around the level and choose a spot to built a floating castle. It would be added to the game, and saved via the internal memory. The castle was randomly placed on the level, and would never appear in the same place twice, no matter how many times you erased, and resrtated your data! He was an incredibly cute character that I finally got around to drawing.

Rendering the king didn’t make me nervous but the castle he created did. It was all but impossible to get a clean picture of the castle from the game for my own personal notes. The original Nightopian Castle was rarely captured on screen because it was not guaranteed to ever show up in the game. Normally it wouldn’t be hard to find a YouTube clip to work from however the Sega Saturn was a 32-bit system from 30 years ago. Any existing video was low resolution. If you didn’t have a video capture card, or an emulator, and knew how to earn the Super Pian then even today it would be hard screenshot to get. The closest thing I could find was a fuzzy shot from the NiGHTS Wiki page but this model was pulled from the PS2 remake, which was not 100% console accurate. The Chinese developers did a really great job recreating the game engine, but not all the assets were accurate to their sprite counterparts.

Whenever there was a game asset that I couldn’t track down then I would challenge myself to draw a reproduction as accurately as I could. So I used every screenshot, and grainy video clip that I could find of the castle to work from. It took me a few days to finalize the design, and it’s essentially a high resolution, vector version of the sprites. There was no doubt that the Nightopian Castle was one of my most challenging drawings of the past decade. Maybe I should put it on a poster or tee shirt for the die-hard fans.

There was another game asset in NiGHTS that I always wanted to recreate. The villain Reala had a stylish logo on the ceiling of his boss battle stage. About 30 years ago my little brother said it would make a great design for a tattoo. I agreed, and finally decided it was time for me to recreate it. It was hard to find a clean screenshot, or the asset uploaded. So again I went by any scans that I could find. Making out the pattern at the bottom of the logo was the hardest part, so I mocked up a couple of different designs. I even changed the hands above the moon a little. Now I’m not saying that I am getting a tattoo with it, but I am certainly thinking about it.

When Valentine’s Day was approaching I decided to see what a pink version of NiGHTS would look like. I even added some Nightopians to round out the pic. I might do other holiday versions in the future. We already have a Christmas version, but I wonder how an autumnal NiGHTS would look like. Orange like the leaves in fall, or black like a Halloween monster? That's food for thought...

After a few weeks of drawing I decided to get out of my comfort zone, and do an illustration of NiGHTS, and Reala as cartoonish, and dynamic as I possibly could. I think the end result really showed how far I had come in the past few years.

The best part about working mainly in Adobe Illustrator is that I can always circle back to a piece and make changes to it. I think the second go round between NiGHTS and Reala works much better. What do you think? All in all it was fun creating new illustrations these past few weeks. I had Sonic Team to thank for that. They kept me motivated when work, and politics had been weighing on my mind. The library of Sega games had inspired me most of my life. It was time to express that love in art form.

To round out my Sonic Team fan art I combined the classic Sonic pose from the cover of Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast but replaced our hero. It was one of the more popular illustrations I ever uploaded to social media.

I know Jet Set Radio is not a Sonic Team game, but it is a Sega title, and one of my favorites of all-time. This will probably be the last time I draw the Sonic Adventure pose, but don't hold me to it.

I hope you enjoyed this look back at how the studio built a fan. I’d like to know if you were a fan of Sonic Team, and if you had a favorite game, or character as well. Tell me about it in the comments section. As always if you enjoyed this blog, and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

Making a Sonic Team fan, part 3...

In the previous blogs I talked about how much I loved the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, and in particular the games made by Sonic Team, rather than the other developers. I also talked about the rare characters that I adored like Ray the Flying Squirrel, and Mighty the Armadillo. As much as I loved those characters I didn’t do too much art featuring them over the past few decades. Cartoon characters had always been difficult for me to draw. I try make realistic illustrations, to draw people, and vehicles in correct scale, and proportion. So going in an a loose animated style was very much out of my comfort zone. That’s not to say it’s impossible for me to do, I’m just not happy with the results when I try to draw the classic Sonic characters. I will on occasion challenge myself, and draw my absolute favorite game character instead NiGHTS from the game NiGHTS into dreams…

The problem with drawing NiGHTS was that I held the character in such high regards that I didn’t want to make a bad illustration. I worked very hard to make sure that they remained proportional to the game model. Even though this was a shape-shifting dream character without actual bones, and organs. I still wanted to make sure that my 2D illustrations gave viewers a sense of a 3D figure. Over the past few years I’ve drawn a few pieces featuring the character, and even the arch-rival named Reala.

NiGHTS and Reala were fun designs literally cut from the same cloth. You could tell that based on their early, and final designs that they were similar in form, and function. Realia had the same moves as the star of the game, and made for a difficult battle if you didn’t know how to approach the “Nightmaren.” The heroes, villains, and minor characters in the game were created by Naoto Ohshima. He of course created most of the original Sonic game cast. The designs in NiGHTS were much more humanoid, and surreal than the cartoon mascots he created for the Sonic franchise. The Nightmaren minions, which looked like dream versions of Pokemon characters were also unlike the robotic monsters that Sonic faced.

When Sonic Team shared some concept art we could see that NiGHTS, and Reala were based on a similar template. The jester-like character had very animated expressions, and a lot of these things were indeed captured in the 3D models created for the game. There was a third, larger Nightmaren boss that also took his cues from the older art. Jackle was more than twice the size of either NiGHTS or Reala. What made him eerie, aside from his laugh was the fact that he had no body. He was a floating head with hands, and feet. He could also fly, and hid his attacks behind a cape. This character was my little brother’s favorite from the game so I had to draw him as well.

The great thing about NiGHTS was how the characters changed shape as they flew around the screens. They were some of the most dynamic early 3D models in console gaming history. For example NiGHTS could dash through the skies with a burst of speed. While doing so their twin-tailed hat would get swept back, and their legs would twist to a point.

This wasn’t the only instant change that the character model had. The character could also turn into a bouncing ball, a bobsled, or even mermaid depending on where they were flying, or swimming through. Illustrating these different versions of the character were certainly an artistic challenge. It was already hard enough drawing the characters standing still, imagine trying to do an illustration of the figure that only appeared for a few moments in a perpetually shifting scene. These were the sorts of details that you could expect in a cartoon, but seeing three-dimensional models do this was truly cutting edge game animation. One of these days I’d like to get around to drawing the other shapes that NiGHTS could turn into during the adventure.

The game also featured tiny cherub-like characters called Nightopians. These were A-Life characters in the game, think of them as the predecessors to the Chao in Sonic Adventure. They had dozens of different animations, and performed many different activities. Things like fishing, building snowmen, sledding, directing traffic, jackhammering the dream world and much more. You could actually help hatch their eggs in game with the main characters. I had always wished that you could pick them up, and play with them in the original NiGHTS into dreams… This was something that you could actually do in the sequel NiGHTS Journey of Dreams. I could imagine how much fun the little guys would have if NiGHTS could zip with them through the air.

The A-life system in the game was actually very deep. You could combine the friendly Nightopians, with the evil Nightmaren and create all sorts of unique combinations. They would each hatch from their own multicolored eggs. Like I said, this predated the similar mechanics feature with the Chao in Sonic Adventure. The absolute rarest Nightopian you could unlock was called the Super Pian aka the King of the Nightopians. 17 years ago I created a video on how to unlock him. While recording my video I managed to do something that I had never been able to repeat. Not only that but I had yet to find another NiGHTS player that managed to get two Super Pains show up in one stage at the same time. Thankfully I had video to prove it, but I digress.

There was a bonus sampler disk of NiGHTS into dreams… released shortly after the title was published. I mentioned it when I did my deep dive on the blog. This sampler contained all sorts of goodies that were meant to be on the original release, if only Sonic Team were given more development time. On that disk several “presents” were available to be unlocked, including the ability to play the demo using Reala instead of NiGHTS. You could only unlock this character if you played the game on April 1, aka April fools day. The studio didn’t get a chance to finish programming Reala’s spin dash animation in the game, however the model files were located in the game files. In fact all sorts of gems were discovered when NiGHTS was datamined.

The original Sega Saturn version was notoriously difficult to crack for people looking to mine assets off of the disks. The same went for a lot of Sega’s hardware. For years, or rather decades people had been trying to find out what secrets Sonic Team had left on the game files. I too felt that the game was very densely packed, although it was a brief game I could tell that the studio put everything they had into it. The first chance to look into the code came when the game was redone, and ported to the PS2. This was easier for the modding community to get into the files, and bring them over to emulators. A number of unused models, and assets were made available to the fan community including unused animations left in the game.

One of the things that blew up in the fan community was the discovery of something fans dubbed Mecha NiGHTS. One of the unused animations featured a Nightopian playing with a remote control NiGHTS toy. Sonic Team made both a sprite model for this figure, and a 3D model as well. They were able to be reassembled, and put into the game by modders. When I found out about this unused asset I had to celebrate the discovery in art form. It was easily one of the coolest looking flying models I’d ever seen. If there was a reason for me to buy a 3D printer, and make an actual physical copy for myself then this was it. There were a few other assets left in the game files. Some of which were minor things, however there was a huge discovery that rocked the fan community to its core. I’ll talk more about this on the next blog, and share the art that came out of this discovery. Did you ever play NiGHTS into dreams… or other rare Sonic Team games like Billy Hatcher, and Burning Rangers? Tell me in the comments section. As always if you enjoyed this blog, and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!