-2014- Oozaru Get You

Ape Escape's Spike vs Oozaru Specter.

I've had this idea for a long time, but obviously never got around to it until recently. I'm sure their scale is off and the Oozaru should be bigger, but I wanted both characters to be decently-sized.

I was debating whether or not I should alter Spike's design a bit to be a cross between him and a DragonBall design, but I decided against it. Just kept him faithful to his original PS1 design. Speaking of PS1, I always thought that bit of blonde hair was a star on his forehead from those pointy old PS1 graphics...

I did the same with Specter (minus the Oozaru form...). It took me a while to find a reference of his original helmet design; I eventually just screencapped a gameplay video. And of course, I'm just assuming he had super stretchy clothes in the PS1 game.

I tried keeping the Sky Flyer design too, despite it not really making any sense. I mean, how does he spin that design to replicate a helicopter?? And the blades cover the whole area when they're fully spun (unless I'm looking at the graphics wrong), despite his hand there and no blades being in the center. I doubt I'm explaining it very well, but hopefully you'd understand if you saw it in gameplay.

The later Sky Flyer designs make more sense, but for some reason I usually like going to the original designs for reference when I do fan art. I just had to leave a spot in the center of the spinning blades though. I can only sacrifice so much reasoning. Of course, I'm sure it still makes no sense overall.

By the way, he's not using it to actually lift off here. My idea here is that he jumped back to dodge Specter, and now he's spinning the Sky Flyer to throw it as a weapon (kind of like a Kienzan).

They're supposed to be fighting in the Peak Point Matrix. I was going to put in some more objects from that level in the back, but I fancied up space with more colours than the game and really liked how it looked. So I didn't want to cover it up even more, after the characters are already covering a lot of it.

I'm not sure if Spike should be casting some sort of shadow on Specter. He probably should be, but I'm horrible at lighting and shadows and don't have the energy to try figuring this out and obsessing over whether I did it right or not. It's a bad sign when I don't really know exactly where the light source is in a picture to work with the shadows I already have down.

I usually throw a faint single-colour layer on top of the whole picture for a subtle lighting thing and to help unify all the colours of a picture a bit, but I left it off of this one. I usually use an orange layer, but it ruined some of the purples and blues here that I really liked. I didn't find any other layer colours I wanted, so I left it alone.

I'm really happy with the picture overall, despite some of the inevitable problems it gave me.

...Why have I become so violent in the last 14 years?!
eric-3.deviantart.com/art/2000…