Submission to Oct. 2002 MVGC

My ninth and final submission to the now-defunct Monthly Video Game Character competition (although I did send him a 10th image I never considered it a submisison - but it was included).  The owner, Ben Krefta, still has the website up and you can peruse other submisisons by going to http://www.organicmetal.co.uk/MVGC/MVGCindex.htm

This was the comment I had included with my submission:
SOFIA: Swap! Sofia dons a police uniform!
"Don't you just hate it when you finally get a subject you've been itching to draw and just as pencil touches paper your mind goes blank.  That's what happened with this month's submission.  God knows how I wanted to draw Sophia and even though I already had a layout in mind (which was based on something that Tsukasa Kotobuki - the designer of the Toshinden characters - had done) I decided to try to think of something more original.  Weeks passed and nothing came to mind.  With the deadline looming I had to use the Kotobuki-inspired layout or don't submit anything.

When Toshinden 2 had first come out, Kotobuki had made an image wherein Ellis and Sophia had exchange costumes - I believe everybody around here knows what I'm referring to.  With that in mind, I had Sophia swap with Tracy - the other playable female character in the game.  I also tried to stay faithful to Kotobuki's style - especially the impossbly long legs.  I'll leave it to your imagination on why Sophia has that expression on her face as she examines a tonfa and why Tracy is reacting in such a manner.

Standard HB pencil on any ol' bond paper. Inked with a .3 tech pen.  This took around a day to do.  Because I had waited too long, I couldn't color the image, so I decided to make the lines cleaner - this took around 11 hours using PhotoShop.  The last thing I did was to Gaussian Blur Tracy so that it was obvious who the focus is."

As another victim of the harddisk crash, this piece's PSD was lost.  Since the submission was black and white it had a smaller file size and I was able to keep it close to the original work's dimensions.  I should re-scan this and color it in the same manner as Kotobuki, although I dread the thought of cleaning up the lines to meet the same level I did with the submission - Ben thought I had used a vector-based art program.