ozziethevampire

IDW Sonic the Hedgehog #51 Cover + Development Sketches

Added 2022-04-25 18:21:02 +0000 UTC

Hello Patrons! Apologies for the radio silence this month--I've been sidetracked with some sudden unexpected development work and dealing with some Tough Stuff in my personal life, so lately I feel like a sad clown juggling bowls of acid. I ended up rewriting it three times, but the script for the new Ozzie chapter is finally just about finished, and I'm still hoping to air early pages here this month. I'm also about halfway done coloring Monster Country #3. I really wanted this stuff out earlier, so I appreciate your patience.

ANYWAY, here's something cool: I got to do the variant "B" cover for Issue 51 of IDW's Sonic the Hedgehog cover! I grew up obsessed with both the Sonic games and comics so drawing this was like coming home to mom's cooking. I wanted to share some behind-the-scenes stuff that led to this collaboration.

First, was a random Blaze the Cat sketch that I drew and posted on Twitter. At that time, I had not drawn any Sonic characters in years, but it ended up catching the eye of an IDW editor, who reached out and asked if I was interested in doing work for the book.

After agreeing, I had to do some test work to get approval from Sega, so I drew a Sonic turnaround and a more properly on-model Blaze.

After I got the go-ahead from Sega, I did some rough thumbnails for cover ideas! I had ideas for covers featuring Shadow, Silver and a whole bunch of other characters, but we agreed that it would probably be best for me to start with something basic, so I ended up using the first design idea.

Next up was the rough pencils for the cover, which had to go through a series of model corrections from the higher-ups at Sega.

And then there's the finished cover! This is the full-res image unrestricted from the CMYK model for printing, so the colors can be more vibrant here.

And finally uh, here's a doodle I made based on a weird dream while I was working on all this. lol.

So there it is! Sonic the Hedgehog #51 will be in stores July 27th!