After the great success of my Realistically Painted Bowser I decided to do another realistic version of a famous videogame character.
This time I tried to imagine how Sonic would look like if he would be a real hedgehog.
The biggest challenge about this one was, that the original Sonic looks everything but realistic. He is so stylized, that it’s hard to tell if he is a hedgehog at all. This made it hard to find a middle course between the initial design and the look of a real hedgehog.
If I would stick to much to the original it wouldn’t look pretty realistic, but if I would get to close to the actual animal one wouldn’t be able to identify him as Sonic.
This was challenging, but also the most interesting part about doing this picture. Until the final design Sonic went thru several revisions.
In the end I decided to give him a color-pattern that resembles a West European Hedgehog but facial proportions that stick to Sonic himself. His white gloves and the red shoes he kept as another link to the original, but the shoes underwent a little redesign. In addition his body looks like that of a runner, making it more believable that he can run at such high speeds.
Finally I did a little old-school pixel-graphic of how a realistic Sonic would look like in one of the old games.
Again the whole picture was painted using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and my Wacom Intuos3 Pen Tablet. No filters or any other stuff like that, just a round brush (mostly pressure-sensitive) and a little bit of the smudge tool. I also tried to keep the numbers of layers as low as possible and reduced them to the background-layer, if I could.
Keeping my means simple and do everything manual gives me more control over what I do and the image gets a more picturesque look instead of the typical Photoshop look.
A little bit about me
My name ist Marcus Blättermann.
I’m majoring in communication design and work as a freelancer for illustration, print- & webdesign. If you like my work you can .
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panther
May 10, 2008
1:43 am
Very impressive!
kel
May 10, 2008
9:28 pm
is it supposed to be cool?
john
May 11, 2008
4:03 am
I love your style!
@kel: Yes……
randy m
May 11, 2008
5:11 pm
do peter griffin from family guy. sonic looks good.
Jandê
May 11, 2008
6:52 pm
This is very very awesome. Great tablet skills!
lysol
May 12, 2008
12:55 am
damn furry
Wafflesplz
November 7, 2008
5:42 am
Whoa! I like the intricate detail you’ve put in this! Fabulous job on it, might I add. :)
assfucker
December 20, 2008
5:26 am
thats fuckin creepy
Darth-Santi
January 9, 2009
11:51 pm
LOL
theRENEX
January 17, 2009
8:18 pm
It’s simply disturbing. I hate it. Yes, I’m a fanboy. I fucking hate it. It’s disturbing. Did I say that I hate it?
sonichedgehog
January 19, 2009
3:03 pm
HOLY SHIT!thats sonic?!
louis
February 11, 2009
12:41 am
coinsedently, before sonic got his powers (in the comics) he was brown with many more spikes (yes I am a sonic geek).
zoology
February 13, 2009
2:10 pm
I admire the effort, tho imho i don’t really like it coz it isnt cute or adorable. A real hedgehog looks cute and adorable. Sonic looks cute and adorable. But this rendition doesnt. It looks more like a monster. In your attempt to combine two different a real hedgehog and sonic, you lost important aspects of both of them.
Davey
February 28, 2009
9:08 pm
I am simply baffled at your attention to detail in this photo. Amazing work, really. The interpretation, I feel, is spot on in submerging such a very ficticious character into real life. Amazing work, I commend you for all your hard work.
@zoology
It is not the point to make something cute or adorable to look at. In real life if there was a mutant headgehog that wore shoes and ran so fast that the ground burned under him, it would be more of monster than hedgehog. Sonic is a freak of nature, and the picture is depicting the reality of the situation. The fact that you think the artist has done a bad job because he represented the character to realistically is ironic and frankly, makes your critique both unintelligent and irrelevant.
douglas r sanderson
September 21, 2009
11:39 am
sega enterprises pty ltd
Derek Trujillo
November 28, 2009
5:50 pm
That is not sonic that is a squirrl dressed up like sonic!
0xym0ron
December 10, 2009
12:20 am
I was doing studies of this painting, and thought about what he would look like from all sides if somebody made a game about this.
It’s not perfect but I have just one question;
I can give credit if I use the colors from the sprite? Been trying to do that for twenty minutes now.
(By the way, Sonic is known as an African Pygmy Hedgehog. Just wanted to let you know.)
ARW
February 7, 2010
5:33 am
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! *Takes deep breath* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAH! He looks funny, but cute. That doesn’t even look like Sonic anymore! WHOOHAHAHAHA!
taylor
February 13, 2010
11:55 pm
that is not sonic