Starting a while back, Udon Entertainment began publishing a line of "Tribute" books. Each book was themed around a different videogame and, in cooperation with that game's publisher, an open call was made for artists around the world for art showing their love for these games.

 

Over two thousand artists submitted for the book focused on Capcom's fighting game "Darkstalkers" while there were only a few hundred pages available. I was so excited when I had first heard I would be in the book, and it's still one of my favorite illustrations to this day!

Like any other illustration, I usually start off with thumbnails of the character(s) or subject that it'll focus on. Mainly to get a feel for the character, mess with shape relations, and zero in on a style.

Albeit a bit messy, this was the original thumbnail I had decided on. I thought that a Sasquatch serving snowcones to baby sasquatches in the summer was a fun way to put the character out of his traditional element. In the game, his stages tend to be surrounded by snowmen, igloos, etc.

Here I blew up the thumbnail and used a light table to redraw it again and again, until I got a nice, cleaner sketch. This was scanned in and used for the final vector art.

Still very rough, mostly figuring out how elements would look, color choices, etc, Thanks to a few fellow artist friends, I was able to really challenge myself in asking what items/elements could be added that were missing from the thumbnails and drawings.

Which brings us here! It was looking much stronger, but compositionally something was missing. The trees in the back didn't prevent my eye from escaping off the image at the bottom right, so...

We got this, the final result!

 

While adding in the menu, it felt like I was missing out if I didn't have some kind of interaction/story going on over there...which lead to me redrawing all the kidsquatches at the bottom. Not only did it liven up the image, but it made sense! :)