bbates.com » Comics

Sonic Dash Liza & Valdez

Ben Bates — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:38:01 +0000

Sketch 5 of 5!

I don’t know anything about either of these two characters. I was surprised to learn that Liza was an established character when I thought she was just a random background character in the Journey to the East story Arc.

In looking up reference online I saw an old panel where she had the little rings around the shoulders like Espio’s original design. I think its a bit of a downer that the redesign of Espio lost this unique detail but it paves the way for Liza to better stand out.

For the first four sketches I was using some Prismacolor grays on them this time around I didn’t have the markers with me when I finished the drawing so I thought this one being the last and containing two characters I’d throw some color on it.

This actually presented a lot more trouble than I anticipated mainly because I couldn’t find decent enough reference on the both of them. So details like their spikes and stuff, they may be wrong.

Second set of Sonic Off-Panel

Ben Bates — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:59:38 +0000

Here’s my pencils although I haven’t actually seen the inked and colored versions for these two strips. Its a lot of fun to see the end result and how different they are from what I would do. In some cases I’m not certain myself what I would do in the color stage but I think Paul made some great choices in the first two Off-Panel strips and I expect to see more of the same.

Lets try something out, mainly for my own personal enjoyment. For the first, I don’t know… five people we’ll say, who respond to me I’ll draw a Sonic character sketch for free. We’ll do it like this-

-You name the character you want, it has to be an official character from the games or the comic. (Links to any reference if its not a main character would be tremendously helpful!)

-I’ll email you a high res scan of the sketch, you could then print it. If you want the physical copy thats cool too but then we’d have to get into five dollars for shipping.

-Email me at benbatesart(at)gmail.com

Subject- Sonic Dash

Name of character-

Address where you want it shipped if need be.

I think this could be a ton of fun. Lets see if any of you out there think so too.

First Official Sonic Art

Ben Bates — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:57:34 +0000

I should have posted this last month when the comics first came out!

I did the art for the Off Panel gag strips in the back of the book for both Sonic 213 and Sonic Universe 17. You can probably still pick these up in bookstores and comic shops. PLUS! The next issues should be out in just a couple of days and those will have more of my Off Panel artwork in them!

Personally I’m super excited about the current Sonic Universe arc with a story based on the GameGear game ‘Tails Adventure’. I never played the game myself until I got this assignment and went to do some research. The Battle Kukku Army is the coolest! I was thrilled that I got to draw Speedy!

And Bean the Dynamite! He quickly became one of my favorite characters when I first played Sonic the Fighters. It’s important to note that I think of him being a lot like Oilman from Megaman.

Here’s the pencils for my first two Off Panel strips.

12 Days of Christmas

Ben Bates — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:22:15 +0000

As the string of fall and winter holidays were approaching I was curious to see what kind of activities a group of creative people like Periscope Studio would be doing. I found out for Hallowe’en theres a big huge haunting on Hawthorne and Thanksgiving brought Germans to the table.

I was especially interested to see what kind of Christmas cheer would sprinkle its way through the hearts of these people. And one exciting event is thanks to Laura Hudson from Comics Alliance to have Periscope Studio do an illustration representing each day for the song ‘12 days of Christmas’. Amazingly, I got to do the 1st day which you can see- HERE! It’s going to be great as each day brings new and fantastic art leading up to Christmas this year.

Oh, only a year or two ago I decided to find out exactly when the 12 days of Christmas are and learned that the first day is Christmas and that it ends on January 6th!