SGDQ2022 Art + A Metroidathan Retrospective

This is a Patreon-exclusive post.

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Hello Dear Patrons. You get this post days before it goes public to everyone else!

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We have a somewhat light-hearted piece today, before we start the 24 hour drive to Anthrocon later this afternoon.

This isn't the first time I've talked about speedrunning charity event Games Done Quick. I try to donate art as often as I can, though nowadays I'm more interested in mutual aids than charities. That said, GDQ is an opportunity for me to consider how my relationship to fanart has changed over the years. Some words have already been written on this from last year's art donation of a Ganondorf portrait. I figured I'd share some new old thoughts based on the one videogame character I've drawn more than any other.

Samus, the protagonist of the scifi series Metroid, has been of interest to me ever since discovering her in Super Smash Bros (N64). I played that fighting game series so consistently since 5th grade that it had a huge impact on me. It relatively came out the same time as the Columbine Shooting. Both must be a kind of demarcation of extremes. I started being more closely exposed to traumatic imagery and also more deeply dove into games without realizing that I was escaping something at all.

In a used game store one year later, I saw a copy of Super Metroid. I didn't really get that Metroid was a series, but at the time I had ample money in my pocket (12USD), more than enough to cover the cost of the SNES cartridge and tax. The clerk at the secondhand game store told me a friend of his was going to be extremely jealous that I bought it. Without even realizing it, I had accidentally bought one of the greatest games ever made.

In the back seat of our parents' separate sedans, I'd hold my N64 controller, frantically flicking the joystick and mashing the buttons while imagining Super Smash Bros on a screen, then I'd hook up videogame consoles as soon as I got to a parent's house. Once the evenings would come and the lights would low, it was the right mood to play a lot of Super Metroid in my dad's Hershey, PA apartment. It was built just a short walk from the Reese's Cup factory and blanketed in the ebb and flow of soothing warm peanut butter and acrid burnt peanut shells. His divorce was barely 4 years prior, and we were all still trying to get our footing. While he drove to the office I was using his home computer to compulsively masturbate to porn every chance I got, download Sailor Moon wallpapers, look up videogame cheat codes, and binge Neopets for upwards of 10 hours a day. Essentially, I cultivated the most embarrassing internet search history my father's boss could have ever seen... and he did see it. "Must be a virus?" my dad thought.

We didn't talk much about life skills, porn, school shootings, nor how my sister and I were at each other's throats. With my head so buried in videogames, I didn't get a chance to develop much of a personality, and I wasn't curious enough to pour into his life more. A budding capital-G Gamer, I existed to consume and be entertained. He later admitted to falling for the lie that children should always live with their mothers during divorce, stymying growth on all parties. My escapist game addiction and patriarchy at large both set us up for this. He was reasonable to fear his children would not enjoying their visits with dad enough to continue shared partial custody. And so I played a lot of videogames, especially Smash Bros. and Super Metroid, and got a lot of scratches and bruises from my sister--some more deserved than others.

This was the summer before I entered my first school year in a large public school. In my small Christian school I was the fastest runner, the best kickball player, and the sharpest thinker. In the public school of a larger and more affluent school district, I was too chubby to run, my slippery sneakers from Payless Shoes skidded loudly as I got pummeled with dodge balls, and I was demoted from the good-special to the bad-special math classes... but I had art. To cope with the huge atmosphere shift from a small Christian school (and the evangelical stereotypes I knew I was a part of), I drew a lot of edgy videogame fanart--mostly Nintendo characters referencing drugs and alcohol, and regurgitating whatever toxic trends I was laughing at on Newgrounds that week. After drawing a bust of Lara Croft with oil pastels that implied nipples poking from behind her turquoise tube top (an accident of the medium grouping where I didn't expect it to), and I felt power when a bully in my grade begged me to let him put it in his locker. It was "very sexy" he said, boldly. Others picking on me the rest of the year, but he didn't.

Less powerful moments were also about vying for peoples affections. Before inviting one friend over, I beat SSB's single player mode with Samus, so this screen would be on my bedroom's CRT. I couldn't imagine having a computer in my room, so I thought the idea of getting to put an image on a screen would be very cool to share.  

My friend did not make fun of me, which was very nice of him.

This moment speaks to this hunger I had for digital art before the idea could even be actualized. Maybe there's just something compelling about a Sci-fi character displayed in an electronic medium. As someone who either played videogames, drew characters copied from videogames, or talked about videogames, it wasn't easy for me to go through impractical school lessons without scribbling in the margins. This happened especially often in Math and Bible classes. For the record, I know both topics have useful applications today, but that's not how they were taught to me in school!

I played videogames with a few friends, so on occasion we'd consummate our shared interest with game-related gifts. When one friend was redecorating a bedroom, I made a mural for him with separate pieces of paper. Even as a rough drawing, having Metroid imagery covering 36x36" of wall space felt too good to be true!

When a rudimentary drawing and text chat program called Pictochat came out on the Nintendo DS, it was also too good to be true. I not only made animations in the program, but I also took photos of drawings of Samus and then tried colouring them in Photoshop.  

You can feel how desperate I was for digital art, can't you. Back then, I didn't know how to colour things, but I knew Photoshop had a Layer Effect called "color", so I started there. What about the green lights on her suit? I guess that's what "hard light" is for, so I tried that. Wow, Photoshop is easy. But why was I using Pictochat for art at all if I had Photoshop on a computer? I guess it's because I was always using old and impractical programs for art:

A friend who donated during the 2020 Kid Pix stream was kind enough to suggest an image of SA-X from Metroid Fusion. Speaking of Fusion, I asked for it for Christmas before buying it with Christmas money to play it several days earlier, requiring my parents to return the copy. Jonathan, you can't just do that.

Fusion came out around the same time as Metroid Prime, a genre-bending adaptation of Metroid series delivered in the first person. The game included unlockable concept art that completely blew my mind: 

Image by Android Jones... back when he was cool, before he did NFTs.

I knew some people had "computer jobs", but it never crossed my mind that artists could make video games as a job. This made me want to do Metroid fanart even more than before, if that was even possible. Because if there was a way I could do art related to videogames as a career, I wanted in.

During one in-school suspension (a good but long story best told over drinks), I spent my time drawing Samus in my sketchbook. With a scanner I got from Christmas (that my mom rightly predicted I would stay up many late nights using)...

...and then digitally inked and coloured it in Photoshop... to a lesser extent.

I remembering working harder on this technical process than any previous image. The geometry of the suit doesn't connect, the lines are sloppy, and the colours and lighting I would describe as "very much digital". But back then I was proud of myself for at least trying something so out of my comfort zone. It must have taken over 15 hours to produce the whole image. We can't know the effort someone puts into any one image we find online, so this serves as a nice reminder to be kind and sensitive when engaging with art out of context.

Just before university, I had enough work and gift money to purchase a 1200USD MacBook, 60GB hard drive space (30GB after bloatware) and 512MB RAM. I was so excited to customize the laptop and do lots of work and--ahem--internet browsing that I barely slept for five days and actually developed  a case of diarrhea from dehydration. I did even more art now that I didn't have to share a computer with the entire family. 

What do you mean, the red colour is hurting your eyes???

My relationship to the Metroid series itself was changing. I played Metroid Prime Hunters on the DS and once beat one of the highest ranked online players in the world, but only because I played in an incredibly cheap way. Competitive games were addicting but always cost me something, and this was no exception. I rented Metroid Prime 2 but didn't play it much: it felt too unnerving to be enjoyable, since my scarcity mindset from growing up in poverty didn't translate well to limited ammo scenarios in-game, and my low spatial acuity made difficult navigation and pacing in the game even harder. After buying a Wii, I enjoyed how Metroid Prime 3's controls felt with that Wii-mote, but the character designs didn't interest me as much as the environments. It became the first game I purchased and then didn't beat. This shift in gaming correlated with increased efforts in my art studies. I realized I needed to be drawing far more than playing games if I was going to have an art career in the future.

In 2014, years into my art career, I broke a fast in Metroid-related art to produce two images, which I'd eventually submit to a Games Done Quick event as metallic paper prints:

The purple gravity suit was still a favourite of mine, and even though I never got to the light suit in Metroid Prime 2, I enjoyed the designs of it enough to revisit it. 

I took pleasure in looking at these two images together. The doodle on the left reminds me of all the academic endeavors I couldn't explore, the 4+ study hall periods in my senior year of high school spent while my classmates with better grades attended free university courses through a "Post-Secondary" program. The image on the right represents years of invested struggle, demystification and experience brought to a conclusion. The Light Suit metallic paper print actually got applause from the audience when it was broadcasted on one of GDQ's prize showcase segments, a reaction that I never saw in all my ears of watching the event!

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Let's skip to the recent image I wanted to share. Metroid Dread came out last winter, a slick and thoughtfully designed Metroid title with a less-is-more design philosophy. I knew I wanted an image about the ongoing changes Samus experiences, implying the end result without showing it explicitly. I started with the following composition, months before the deadline.

I wanted a simple but bold portrayal of energy surging through the character. With this limited amount of detail it could have been fine, but as I approached the drop deadline for submitting a print to GDQ, I couldn't help but feel like I painted myself into a wall:

A kind of visual constipation had developed. As I tried to free up the visor, I invited more tangents that just weren't working. It felt like the composition wasn't worth exploring, even though the deadline was barely two days away. In moments like this, I'd tell my mentees to reassess their concepts and build from the thumbnail stage. For the Ganondorf image I submitted the previous year, I got lucky and required no thumbnail, but it sure did shoot me in the butt this time around.

With the deadline only a day-and-a-half away, I hit the thumbnail stage in HEAVYPAINT (a kind of spiritual successor to a favourite art program of mine, Alchemy) to see what I could do if I thought a little harder and clearer from the start. 

These were all the same concepts as the first composition, but now even head positioning and hand poses were clearly minded. (Jonathan, aren't you a professional? Why you gotta relearn this lesson, Jonathan!) I opted for the main tangent being the canon going off-canvas to the left. I wanted Samus to feel compromised, not cool and badass. She's plenty of both throughout Dread, but I knew which part I wanted to focus on.

Using the lasso and grit brush, I got it to this stage before going to bed on the last day. At this stage I was confident that I could sleep both nights and still get the work done, successfully avoiding an all-nighter despite busting out some tricky timing.

Thanks to gamers uploading all the Dread cinematics on Youtube, it was much easier for me to tweak geometry. Late into the evening, when I got to add this high-contrast lighting, I knew things were gonna be alright. These stages I've heard referred to as "visual spice", if thinking of your art in terms of a recipe. You can't have a good thing overwhelming the whole image, but you need a li'l pizazz sometimes. In this case, the subdued green lights of the gravity suit, paired with both the magenta and green energy coursing out of her, was the moment hope was restored in me that I wouldn't resort to an all-nighter.

So by 1:30 AM on the day of the deadline, the image was completed! It took 15 hours of streaming at the end, including a decision to not resort to a late-night energy drink. I was proud of myself for taking on a risk and producing an image I actually liked by the end of it:

I know it's not to everyone's tastes, but I also was glad to keep the majority of the gesture lines in the HEAVYPAINT sketch.

And finally, because this image is going to be presented to Summer Games Done Quick 2022 as a white aluminum print, I purposefully chose this lighting scenario and colour palette to emphasize this particular physical presentation of the medium. I wish I could watch it when the stream is live, but I'll be in the middle of what I hope to be a hectic time selling a lot of my art in the Anthrocon Dealer's Den. The SGDQ stream is linked here for you to enjoy for me!

Updates coming in July:

The $5 Artist Tier will get a small .psd showing the detailed process after I get back from Anthrocon. It's a weird but fun process I think you'll enjoy! You'll also get wallpaper variants for Desktop (and smartphone, I guess).

The $10 Black Hare tier will get the .psd and the high res image, which will have lots of little nuggets to enjoy at over 7k pixels on the largest side!

Thanks for reading, friends, family, and Metroid fans. And thanks to SGDQ for once again allowing me to be a part of your event.

Love,

-J