Sonic the Hedgehog 4
Spoilers for Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Sonic the Hedgehog is my favorite franchise followed by Super Mario and as a huge fan of the video game property, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is my favorite movie in recent years. One of the things that the Sonic movies do similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that there are post credit scenes that set up the sequel.
At the end of Sonic 3, Sonic comes face to face with Metal Sonic, a robot doppelgänger of Sonic built by Dr. Eggman to match the pesky hedgehog, before being rescued by Amy Rose, a pink hedgehog who wields a massive hammer. Both Amy Rose and Metal Sonic made their debut in 1993 in the Sega CD game Sonic CD. One of the aspects of this game is that Sonic can travel through time by running fast enough through a post that says either past or future taking him to either a paradise from the past untouched by Eggman’s actions or a ruined future where the doctor rules the world. And according to rumors, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 will feature time travel.
This means that Sonic 4 will be an adaptation Sonic CD similar to how Sonic 3 is an adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2.
Inspiration
As Sonic the Hedgehog 4 will likely be based off of Sonic CD, I wanted to make the poster feel like it’s paying homage to it’s source material. The box arts market the hell out of Metal Sonic, building him up as Sonic’s ultimate rival. Ironically enough, while he did become a fan favorite character, Metal Sonic doesn’t actually show up much in Sonic CD. And with the movie being released in March of 2027, we know he’s going to be in the film but it’s unknown how prevalent his role will be. So with all of these unknown factors that only time can tell, I tried to limit myself when it came to adapting it into a poster.
Before I did the final product, I did a sketch on paper to get a rough idea of what I was doing. This included changing the designs from the box art to the movies. The changes that both got were that they were made more tall and lanky as opposed to the more round bodies on the box.
For Sonic, he had to go through quite a bit of changes to match his big screen self. For starters, his quills were shorter, his shoes were completely different and he had two eyes where as the original has, and still does in game, one eye but two pupils. He also has fur on his arms unlike the game version and his head is smaller where as on the box art it’s the size of his body.
The changes made to Metal Sonic weren’t too Drastic and most of them were the same given to Sonic like making him taller, his head smaller and he now has a waist. He was also given more detail that fit in line with the movies, since we do get a good look of him in the post credits of Sonic 3
And of course, I had to throw in a cheesy tagline.
Starting on Paper
Digital Translation
With the paper version done, I simply translated it into ibisPaint on my phone. This allowed me to translate the the colors of the characters. Metal Sonic I used his in game color scheme, as the post credit scene takes place at night. Looking at early concept art of Sonic 4, it seems that these estimates are very close. One difference from the games though is that the movie version of Metal Sonic has yellow highlights around his eyes. This is likely due to the fact that in the movies, Metal Sonics are going to be mass produced and the main one will have these highlights.
Sonic on the other hand had quite a few color differences from his video game counterpart. The biggest one is that he is a lighter blue than in the games. For his color scheme, I used the comics that were made to promote the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie. The shading was made to emulate said comics as well as adding some shine to Metal Sonic as he’s made of… metal.
Background
I didn’t want to just do the same checkered background colors as where would be the fun in that. So I wanted to go with the whole theme of space and time. In the background, I wanted to make the time portal from Sonic Generations which Sonic and friends use to travel through different points in time similar to CD. It’s unknown how time travel will be implemented in the movie, so maybe in 2 years, this'll come back to bite me. Those dots being sucked into the portal were made using stars but inverting the colors.