There was such a chapter in my life… Back in 2003, I met an interesting young man online who shared my interests in Sonic, and his name was Fargus. I didn’t have my own computer at the time, so I was writing to him from a computer club. We started to write a general fan story-crossover for our versions of the Sonic Universe, and something even started to shape up. Later I learned that Fargus had founded the most famous Sonic movement in the post-Soviet space, and joined his community.
In the picture above are my friends from the time. But the style in which I drew space hedgehogs (and other Mobian animals) was not very good. I really wanted to bring cartoon hedgehogs closer to realism and somehow squeeze the brain into their heads in realistic proportions, hence “sonics with plump heads”… Later it dawned on me that cartoons didn’t need such crude realism. The negative reaction of people on DeviantArt is a confirmation to this…
I’m amazed at how sometimes you need a healthy slap on the face. Even me. It helps to wake up and stop talking nonsense. I myself sometimes don’t mind criticizing other people’s work. It’s fair to be criticized by others, and so far (mostly) this criticism has been constructive, except for cases of outright hatred from the people who just needed a punching bag.
In any case, for the sake of this memoir, I’ll bring up that Sonic CIS became my second family in those years, and it is not surprising, because I was experiencing a teenage rebellion and the desire to run away from home… Fargus and Sy-Creich became my best friends at the time, and we were online almost every day. In my case, even in the early morning. When the time came to congratulate each other on important holidays, we drew pictures of each other.
For context: Fargus and Sy were in love with each other, and I was their engagement angel (at least in my own eyes). Of course, then came the harsh realities of life, and they parted, but the memory remained.
Experiments with 3D and Other Stuff
The picture above is one of my first successful models in 3D. In this case, I was trying to portray the spirit of the community. It looks passable, although this particular version of the render was post-processed by me recently, since publishing it without a background and in those terrible colors would be a shame for me. I had fix it to make it look beautiful.
In the later stages of my stay at “Sonic CIS”, we wanted to make a video game based on our community. Tyoma was the programmer, but he did not have enough experience to get this project going… In the meantime, I was trying to put together the sprites of playable characters in multiple color variations to make it interesting. I will not name all the authors of the avatars listed below, suffice to say they were all participants of Sonic CIS back then:
As far as I remember, the project stalled due to the fact that Tyoma was building the game in the “Game Maker”, and he failed to program loop-de-loops which are so often used in the Sonic games… But I made some sprites, and even added animations. To be honest, only one character got fully animated – the white fox Nef. The rest exist only in the form of static sprites.
Beginning of the End
Very soon came a turning point in my life. A lot of newcomers poured into the community after the release of “Sonic Heroes”, a game that I fiercely hated for rebooting the series for a primary school age audience… These new people infuriated me with their appearance and behavior, as a result of which I decided to retire from the community due to the clash of opinions. Sonic was no longer the same, sliding down into the realm of mediocre games for babies, and this kind of Sonic, much like his fans, were of little interest to me. The vintage era was over and I had to move on.
Having a falling-apart with Fargus over his trans-humanist leanings and the changed atmosphere of the community as a whole, I began to interact more often with another member called Zell.
On the left is an old version of Zell’s avatar, which was essentially a recolor of Knuckles. And on the right is my redesign, which I did not long before finally getting lost for the community in a completely different part of the Internet. Those were years 2005-2006, I think. Frequently talking to Zell at the time, I learned about such games as “Gunstar Heroes”, “Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire”, and “Psychonauts”, although I played the latter years later – last year – because I wasn’t interested in that game at the time.
The Final Pictures
At the end of this note I will share some of the most interesting drawings for me at the time. Above is the lioness called Nionrica, the character belongs to her, and it was a request that I granted because I was interested. There was another drawing with Nionrica, but it was a sketch and I will not publish it because of the poor quality of the drawing.
By race, this character seems to have been a cat. I don’t remember his exact name, but that’s the name used in the old files. This is an experimental sketch, but I was very interested to draw it at the time. So yes, a thank you to Sand for the opportunity to draw his character😁
Manga-Fargus. As I moved away from the swollen-headed hedgehogs style, I looked at Japanese manga illustrations a lot (a type of comic book), and tried to understand the principle behind their creation. This picture was never colored, but it turned out well, so I will put it here at the end.
★~End of Note~★
