i'd pin this comment but i legally can't so i'm editing my pinned instead. you're right! mixed up some names when i was going through my research. i think i'm going to try and cut this part out of the video. sorry bout that! edit: i've trimmed the part out of the video. thank you for pointing this out 🙏
For a second I've read "Yuji Uekawa" instead of "Yuji Naka" and I was like: "Huh??? What is this person on about? It was literally Yuji Uekawa who designed Modern Sonic!"
Years ago when I researched Uekawa-sama's work, I read that he took direct inspiration from graffiti art. You can especially see it in the earlier instances of this style, such as the promo illustration he made for Sonic Jam (as seen on the cover of the June 6th, 1997 issue of Sega Saturn Magazine). That illustration features classic Sonic with extra phat black lines and no shading (save for a few select gradients on certain textures), and is very graffiti-esque.
@@thomoclock Yeah! :D Great video and tutorial, by the by! Trying to use Illustrator makes my head hurt, so the step by step guide is very much appreciated. xP
DUUUDE! I never knew the Sonic Adventure artwork was done in vector. That's awesome! I work with vectors all the time for my drawings, and I recognize these exact blobby imperfections. These aren't because the artist was using the blobby pen, in fact these imperfections come from a vector tracing tool (like potrace). Meaning Uekawa might have either used a digital art program to draw the line-art, or drew the line-art all on paper and scanned it before using something like potrace to turn it all into a vector shape. Doing it this way can make the line-art more blobby in a lot of spots, but at a high eough resolution these imperfections become almost unnoticeable. Lastly, from the looks of it, the artist might have done the shading back in something like Photoshop like you showed (likely because vector tools at the time were probably more limited), but through Inkscape you can actually replicate this shading method with either some cleverly placed radial gradients and clipping masks, or by using the gausian blur filter on a some shapes along with more clipping masks. Clipping masks are pretty much a requirement if you do any gradient shading with vector graphics. So cool to find-out that Uekawa was doing vector art way back in the late 90s. Even if not fully like what I'm doing with my art.
That's interesting! I did consider using Image Trace for the video instead of manually drawing the line art in vector. But to me it felt like I'd have to draw the line art either way so I just did it like this. If you run it through Simplify afterwards, it'll produce the same blobby imperfections. I also cut out a part of the video where I explain various gradient tools within Illustrator itself because it got too long, but ultimately I do think he just did this in Photoshop anyway.
@@thomoclock I'll be honest, even if it would have been cool to see you explain certain gradient techniques, you made the right choice to cut it out of the video. Talking about clipping masks, clones, radial gradients, filters, different ways to merge two paths into one, and ways to optimize your vector drawings would have made everyone's brains melt. Vectors are just plain tough to explain to anyone, sticking to the basics was for the better. I'm also kinda jealous of that blobby pen tool in Adobe Ilustrator. Inkscape doesn't have that and it's plain agony to draw anything with Inkscape's janky pen tool. It's why I resort to using trace tools for the line-art (and even for flat colouring because Inkscape's bucket tool also sucks).
i wasn't sure what to expect, but the art at the end was AMAZING, incredible emulation of the lineart, and the action poses were super fluid and dynamic, and taking your time to explain the process was just a cherry on top, good work!!
Door Into Summer from Knuckles Chaotix playing during the background research explanation of vector images made me so unbelievably happy. the vector game :)
the amount of research to your videos is amazing, i look forward to your channel receiving even more good fortune! i think your free-form style and commentary is very fun and i wish you more support 🫶 as a kid, the sonic adventure art style always intrigued me with the bold gradients, so seeing the breakdown is great :D in addition, this may be the most thorough tutorial of illustrator i’ve ever seen so kudos to you!
I love how blobby, flowy and unrefined this style is; it’s just brimming with charm and attitude. I used to ogle at the Sonic Adventure art so much as a kid, this video would’ve absolutely blown my mind 😂 Uekawa’s amazing and this style will always be my favorite from him
I love this series man, super high quality and for an artist super informative, I've used illustrator a ton for logo designs, and I've never bothered using any of the more drawing type tools but after your showcase I learned some more and realized that I was missing out quite a lot by not using them.
btw i adore all your render breakdown videos, they're so interesting and allow me insight into something i've always wondered about but dont have the experience or knowledge to research and replicate at my current level
This video was AWESOME!! I’m taking an introductory class to A/V technology, and in the class I’m learning how to use Adobe Illustrator. I’m new to this channel, so this video blew me away with how educational it was. This video helped me learn so many things about a software I’m not too familiar with, so I hope you continue to make content like this because I’ll be sticking around.
One of the reasons why I think I like vector art is probably thanks to the Sonic 2 HD team and how the work they have done using Vectors have been very impressive. Oh also Blender is a 3D software that does have the option to draw with vectors with its grease pencil tool for 2D animation, you can even export those drawings as SVG to open them in other software like AI and Inkscape.
hi man great vid! just thought i should say that a lot of the sketches for sonic adventure's character art & sonic R's soundtrack art were done by Satoshi Okano & my understanding is that Okano and Yuji Uwekawa would kind of collaborate back and forth specifically on adventure's character art. i might be a bit fuzzy on the details but i know that okano has posted about it on his twitter account and afaik uwekawa didnt become the sole artist until SA2. dont mean to nitpick i did quite enjoy the video lol!
I LOVE Vector art. I make icons on Illustrator every day for fun. I'm glad to see a video going over how tools work, encouraging others to give it a shot! There were some techniques in this video that I definitely need to mess around with more. I'm really bad at using the simplify function, so that's something I have to work on. I've gotta try doing my own Sonic-inspired artwork sometime
very high quality series, we rly need more art stuff w this level of effort on yt, way too much stuff out there is just drama or clickbaity reaction content instead of actual analysis of stuff like this
social media feels so much more fufilling when you say idc to drama and hate watching and watch things you actually have interest in. its harder than it sounds
This is how I’ve made art for years, wish more people knew you don’t have to produce vector art the ‘conventional’ way. I use Affinity Designer nowadays
Hmm.. quick question: if the official art you downloaded was vector, then how can you paint the gradients with Photoshop, which deals in raster? How would you get your chao art back to vector art?
I think you didn't mention another person who did the sketches for SA1? I remember seeing, I think on "fandom", that he wasn't the one who did the art entirely 🤔
Someone else mentioned this in the comments earlier, and unfortunately it's a fact I missed. Not much I can do about this except add this as addendum on my pinned Edit: I looked up the Sonic artworks that Satoshi Okano worked on, and while it's similar to what Sonic Adventure's artworks eventually became, it's not exactly the same. Perhaps Okano influenced Uekawa, but the art styles are still distinct. Does anyone have a source/link to Okano being the one to make the sketches for SA1? I can find his old tweets, but nothing about them indicates that he did that.
On my video description, it's the Dreamcast Digital Presskit link. It should link to a forum post on Sonic Retro, which contains a link to archive.org. Unfortunately, Internet Archive itself is down atm because they got hacked a couple days ago :( Looks like they're preparing to go back up again in a couple days though
I believe the Sonic retro site still has em, I remember seeing some svg files available for download on like a Sonic Adventure Artwork guidebook thingie
Great analysis, but I feel like the art could've been done better (on a technical level), like the results are great, but there gotta be a better way to do the shading
You definitely got a couple more options for doing the shading inside Illustrator itself (such as drop shadows + clip masking), but ultimately I think that switching over to Photoshop is just the most efficient way of doing it. It doesn't seem like EPS files for the artworks with the shading exist, so my theory is that Uekawa probably has a similar pipeline of exporting the vector files into raster, then painting over them. But of course, a portion of my videos will always just be speculative unless we ask the artists themselves
maybe in the future, probably as a separate series. i do have an upcoming episode on the modern persona artworks (3, 4, 5) and it's basically just a Soejima video lol
Would you be able to provide another link to the vector files? On the Sonic Retro website, both links in the forum come up as either "service unavailable" or "connection is not private."
unfortunately the entirety of the internet archive is down at the moment. but you can find the vector files on Sonic Retro itself; if you visit the Sonic Adventure page, scroll down to Artworks, should bring you to a page that basically is the contents of the press kit
I usually work in CSP which unfortunately only supports vector lines. Its still extremely useful for lineart tho, especially in animation. But you cant do all this stuff AFAIK
so you're telling me i could recreate the sonic R official soundtrack disk art style using fucking SCRATCH??? i didnt need any expensive art program shit????
The first 500 people to use my link skl.sh/thomoclock10241 will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare premium!
"What is Vector art" you ask? Yes, it's uuuhhh fanart of Vector the Crocodile
Huh?, i thought vector art is doodles out of Vector from Despicable me?
2:19 Big correction, Sonic was NOT designed by Yuji Naka. He was designed by Naoto Oshima, Yuji Naka was the lead programmer
i'd pin this comment but i legally can't so i'm editing my pinned instead. you're right! mixed up some names when i was going through my research. i think i'm going to try and cut this part out of the video. sorry bout that!
edit: i've trimmed the part out of the video. thank you for pointing this out 🙏
@@thomoclock you... havent edited your pin yet
@@Veruis1009 ive cut the part out of the video itself, dont need to clarify it on my pinnned
For a second I've read "Yuji Uekawa" instead of "Yuji Naka" and I was like: "Huh??? What is this person on about? It was literally Yuji Uekawa who designed Modern Sonic!"
Years ago when I researched Uekawa-sama's work, I read that he took direct inspiration from graffiti art. You can especially see it in the earlier instances of this style, such as the promo illustration he made for Sonic Jam (as seen on the cover of the June 6th, 1997 issue of Sega Saturn Magazine). That illustration features classic Sonic with extra phat black lines and no shading (save for a few select gradients on certain textures), and is very graffiti-esque.
That's so cool, it definitely shows. Glad I added that blurb in the video lol
@@thomoclock Yeah! :D Great video and tutorial, by the by! Trying to use Illustrator makes my head hurt, so the step by step guide is very much appreciated. xP
DUUUDE! I never knew the Sonic Adventure artwork was done in vector. That's awesome!
I work with vectors all the time for my drawings, and I recognize these exact blobby imperfections. These aren't because the artist was using the blobby pen, in fact these imperfections come from a vector tracing tool (like potrace).
Meaning Uekawa might have either used a digital art program to draw the line-art, or drew the line-art all on paper and scanned it before using something like potrace to turn it all into a vector shape. Doing it this way can make the line-art more blobby in a lot of spots, but at a high eough resolution these imperfections become almost unnoticeable.
Lastly, from the looks of it, the artist might have done the shading back in something like Photoshop like you showed (likely because vector tools at the time were probably more limited), but through Inkscape you can actually replicate this shading method with either some cleverly placed radial gradients and clipping masks, or by using the gausian blur filter on a some shapes along with more clipping masks. Clipping masks are pretty much a requirement if you do any gradient shading with vector graphics.
So cool to find-out that Uekawa was doing vector art way back in the late 90s. Even if not fully like what I'm doing with my art.
That's interesting! I did consider using Image Trace for the video instead of manually drawing the line art in vector. But to me it felt like I'd have to draw the line art either way so I just did it like this. If you run it through Simplify afterwards, it'll produce the same blobby imperfections.
I also cut out a part of the video where I explain various gradient tools within Illustrator itself because it got too long, but ultimately I do think he just did this in Photoshop anyway.
@@thomoclock
I'll be honest, even if it would have been cool to see you explain certain gradient techniques, you made the right choice to cut it out of the video. Talking about clipping masks, clones, radial gradients, filters, different ways to merge two paths into one, and ways to optimize your vector drawings would have made everyone's brains melt. Vectors are just plain tough to explain to anyone, sticking to the basics was for the better.
I'm also kinda jealous of that blobby pen tool in Adobe Ilustrator. Inkscape doesn't have that and it's plain agony to draw anything with Inkscape's janky pen tool. It's why I resort to using trace tools for the line-art (and even for flat colouring because Inkscape's bucket tool also sucks).
Really faithful recreation of the iconic SA1 art style. I also appreciate how thoroughly you breakdown the drawing process.
In SA1, Tikal does say "Chao" aloud. For instance, "These are the Chao that you were protecting" in the Final Story
my friend and I used to pronounce them "Kay-oh" (Like "K.O") until we saw that scene at the end and were like "Oh so that's how it's pronounced" lol
I hope this series continues ever more. I just binged all of your episodes. This has been so fun, thank you!
21:20 Thanks for using my Corneria beat here, I really appreciate it! Your drawing skills are elite 🤩👌🔥
thanks for the tracks B)
who remembers those old videos of people teaching you how to draw in this style? still affects the way I draw lines today, though I don't use vector
i wasn't sure what to expect, but the art at the end was AMAZING, incredible emulation of the lineart, and the action poses were super fluid and dynamic, and taking your time to explain the process was just a cherry on top, good work!!
Door Into Summer from Knuckles Chaotix playing during the background research explanation of vector images made me so unbelievably happy. the vector game :)
thank you! glad someone noticed. tried my best to fit the music to the scene
the sick soundtrack that comes with a game!
Never heard of vector art before, you explained it so well!
the amount of research to your videos is amazing, i look forward to your channel receiving even more good fortune! i think your free-form style and commentary is very fun and i wish you more support 🫶
as a kid, the sonic adventure art style always intrigued me with the bold gradients, so seeing the breakdown is great :D in addition, this may be the most thorough tutorial of illustrator i’ve ever seen so kudos to you!
also how am i just noticing that knuckles has lego ass shoes.
like???
lol same
I just discovered your channel and you are criminally underrated! Please keep up the good work and engaging editing!
I love how blobby, flowy and unrefined this style is; it’s just brimming with charm and attitude. I used to ogle at the Sonic Adventure art so much as a kid, this video would’ve absolutely blown my mind 😂
Uekawa’s amazing and this style will always be my favorite from him
I love this series man, super high quality and for an artist super informative, I've used illustrator a ton for logo designs, and I've never bothered using any of the more drawing type tools but after your showcase I learned some more and realized that I was missing out quite a lot by not using them.
btw i adore all your render breakdown videos, they're so interesting and allow me insight into something i've always wondered about but dont have the experience or knowledge to research and replicate at my current level
This video was AWESOME!! I’m taking an introductory class to A/V technology, and in the class I’m learning how to use Adobe Illustrator. I’m new to this channel, so this video blew me away with how educational it was. This video helped me learn so many things about a software I’m not too familiar with, so I hope you continue to make content like this because I’ll be sticking around.
One of the reasons why I think I like vector art is probably thanks to the Sonic 2 HD team and how the work they have done using Vectors have been very impressive. Oh also Blender is a 3D software that does have the option to draw with vectors with its grease pencil tool for 2D animation, you can even export those drawings as SVG to open them in other software like AI and Inkscape.
hi man great vid! just thought i should say that a lot of the sketches for sonic adventure's character art & sonic R's soundtrack art were done by Satoshi Okano & my understanding is that Okano and Yuji Uwekawa would kind of collaborate back and forth specifically on adventure's character art. i might be a bit fuzzy on the details but i know that okano has posted about it on his twitter account and afaik uwekawa didnt become the sole artist until SA2. dont mean to nitpick i did quite enjoy the video lol!
Great video! I would love for you to analize the Sonic Battle art style, it captures some of that graffiti vibe that you mentioned.
I NEEDED THAT VIDEO SO DAMN MUCH!! THANK YOUUU 😭😭
How random. I was thinking about the art style of the sonic adventure games every now and then. How great that someone chose to make a video about it
wait this is a little thing, but i really like the editing on how the text from quotes get displayed
I LOVE Vector art.
I make icons on Illustrator every day for fun.
I'm glad to see a video going over how tools work, encouraging others to give it a shot!
There were some techniques in this video that I definitely need to mess around with more.
I'm really bad at using the simplify function, so that's something I have to work on.
I've gotta try doing my own Sonic-inspired artwork sometime
This literally couldnt have come at the more perfect time for me. Cant wait to watch this! I've been tryna learn this style a lot lately.
very high quality series, we rly need more art stuff w this level of effort on yt, way too much stuff out there is just drama or clickbaity reaction content instead of actual analysis of stuff like this
social media feels so much more fufilling when you say idc to drama and hate watching and watch things you actually have interest in. its harder than it sounds
Ive been trying to learn this artstyle for awhile now
Love your analysis!! ❤❤
Might be fun to try this art style in Inkscape some day, I only do vector art and have for years. Sonic Retro is great.
This is how I’ve made art for years, wish more people knew you don’t have to produce vector art the ‘conventional’ way.
I use Affinity Designer nowadays
Amazing work!
loved this !! they looked great :D
:0 ohhh it's vector that explains a lot
man i wish i saw this when i was doing a lil meme redraw thing in the style
So that is why redrawing sonic in adobe illustrator is easy
thank you for pronouncing gif the right way
Hmm.. quick question: if the official art you downloaded was vector, then how can you paint the gradients with Photoshop, which deals in raster? How would you get your chao art back to vector art?
Once you turn it into PSD, it stops being vector. The only pure vector artwork I attempted here was Slippy, which is done towards the end of the vid
I think you didn't mention another person who did the sketches for SA1? I remember seeing, I think on "fandom", that he wasn't the one who did the art entirely 🤔
Someone else mentioned this in the comments earlier, and unfortunately it's a fact I missed. Not much I can do about this except add this as addendum on my pinned
Edit: I looked up the Sonic artworks that Satoshi Okano worked on, and while it's similar to what Sonic Adventure's artworks eventually became, it's not exactly the same. Perhaps Okano influenced Uekawa, but the art styles are still distinct.
Does anyone have a source/link to Okano being the one to make the sketches for SA1? I can find his old tweets, but nothing about them indicates that he did that.
4:58 where are these files? I checked the links but I couldnt really find it
On my video description, it's the Dreamcast Digital Presskit link. It should link to a forum post on Sonic Retro, which contains a link to archive.org.
Unfortunately, Internet Archive itself is down atm because they got hacked a couple days ago :( Looks like they're preparing to go back up again in a couple days though
Internet Archive is down currently I'm BEGGING you to please upload the sonic vector art so others can download it
I believe the Sonic retro site still has em, I remember seeing some svg files available for download on like a Sonic Adventure Artwork guidebook thingie
@@aze_9 yep, Sonic Retro does host them on the site. I added a Google Drive link on my video description though in case you still wanted it :)
Great analysis, but I feel like the art could've been done better (on a technical level), like the results are great, but there gotta be a better way to do the shading
You definitely got a couple more options for doing the shading inside Illustrator itself (such as drop shadows + clip masking), but ultimately I think that switching over to Photoshop is just the most efficient way of doing it.
It doesn't seem like EPS files for the artworks with the shading exist, so my theory is that Uekawa probably has a similar pipeline of exporting the vector files into raster, then painting over them. But of course, a portion of my videos will always just be speculative unless we ask the artists themselves
"part 5 - BOSS: C O M M U N I T Y"
XD
Lineart so yammy looking... And poses also awesome
So great fanart!
the plural of "chao" is "chao," kinda like deer
Can you do it about Overwatch's (og ow and ow2) artstyle? 🤔
Would you ever do a video like this but for specific artists?
maybe in the future, probably as a separate series. i do have an upcoming episode on the modern persona artworks (3, 4, 5) and it's basically just a Soejima video lol
Would you be able to provide another link to the vector files? On the Sonic Retro website, both links in the forum come up as either "service unavailable" or "connection is not private."
unfortunately the entirety of the internet archive is down at the moment. but you can find the vector files on Sonic Retro itself; if you visit the Sonic Adventure page, scroll down to Artworks, should bring you to a page that basically is the contents of the press kit
I’ve never been art school
I usually work in CSP which unfortunately only supports vector lines.
Its still extremely useful for lineart tho, especially in animation. But you cant do all this stuff AFAIK
Pretty cool!
ah.
why didn't anyone tell me earlier.
Scared me with that intro there…
lol
dude I swear to you I almost clicked off 😭
so you're telling me i could recreate the sonic R official soundtrack disk art style using fucking SCRATCH??? i didnt need any expensive art program shit????
you should check out inkscape! it's free, and it's basically on par with illustrator features wise
plural "artworks" irks the living hell out of me for some reason...
If feels like saying you have a bowl full of rices, or a bucket of waters.
v cool
How do you decide where the highlights are?
i mostly just place the highlights on the outer edge of the shapes, so it's like the light source is coming from behind them
bup