Furry Fight

Anyone who’s ever played the ancient side-scrolling arcade beat-em-up Final Fight (ask your granny) should hopefully get the joke here. This picture was made as a surprise for Vince Suzukawa, creator of The Class Menagerie, and was inspired by an illustration of his characters Cody Frost (the tiger) and Drake Braeburn (the dragon) in fierce-looking fists-clenched growly poses. It was remarked by someone that they resembled characters from a Capcom fighting game, at which point my brain went ‘Ping!’ and Furry Fight was born.

It wasn’t quite as simple as that, of course. I’d decided from the off that I wanted to make the piece look as authentic as possible, in terms of the style of the characters and the composition, and this meant doing some things I’d never attempted before. These included lots of computery tinkering to put the whole thing together and using Photoshop to do the colouring, and because I was learning what to do as I went along, it took quite a while to complete.

Before I began drawing anything, I went on a bit of a web-scour to find some good visual references for the characters. I wanted Drake and Cody to mimic the fighting moves of two of the hero characters from the original game (specifically Haggar and, er, Cody), and I needed to choose two suitably imposing baddies for them to beat up. (The thugs you see here are spoofs of Andore, the huge meat-headed wrestler bloke (whose first name was Hugo, oddly), and Bill Bull, the big fat beardy chap who always came charging onto the screen head-first only to get kicked straight off it again.) At great personal risk I also gained access to some screenshots from the game itself, providing me with a ready-made background and a template for the energy bars.

It took very little time to draw and ink the characters as outlines (and also some portraits of them, to go next to the health meters), but things became considerably more complicated after I’d scanned them in. Believe me, when someone like John Lasseter insists that computers don’t make life any easier for artists, he’s not just killing time between collecting Oscars and telling his PC to make Toy Story 3 for him. The computer colouring was a lot more difficult than I’d expected, even without using graded shading, but I learnt a great deal as I went along and it was definitely much quicker than pencils would have been. Not having to draw the background was jolly handy too (although it took *hours* to get the lettering right), and it was even possible to pixellate the characters slightly to make them look more like in-game sprites, and integrate them properly with their surroundings. I love my Mac.

I could go on for hours about this pic, and it appears I already have done, so I’d probably better stop now. However, as a little Extra Thing for all of you who troubled to read this far, here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what went into making this image. Lucky old you, eh?

Oh yes, and if you want to send comments/questions/proposals of marriage to Mr Suzukawa, you can do it with this. It’s clever stuff, this internet.

Matthew Smith

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