Yep! Everyone knows about Sonic Riders.

First day I saw the official artwork, I was like, "DAMN! I need to do Shadow artwork!"

Funilly enough, a friend of mine ~canebrake had noted me the very day I decided to create the hoax, with the same intentions. Though, her version was of Shadow on the airboard, like from the Animation opening. Mine, I wanted to try the pencil crayon look I saw. ^^ So we both worked on our own and decided to release them at the same time.

She had to help me with the linework on my image, though, because my hand was't steady enough. @_@ I couldn't do it proprely. In the end, Shadow's nose ended up being a slight bit big, because she traced something I had traced.

I began by tracing Sonic, as I had seen that Jet and Sonic were copied directly off of eachother. Good base. Then I tried to find a dramatic pose for his arms at least. Sonic looked different than his usual Uekawa style, like someone started it, but Uekawa did the rest of the characters. So it didn't look quite like his. With that in mind, I recreated Shadow to fit that style, too. which is why his spines are curved, not pointed, and his face looks off.

the goggles were ~canebrake's design, I tried my hand at creating a Sonic Riders type style Shadow shoe, but it ended up being Sonic and Tails' shoes mixed together, with the trademark "robotnik" lines on the front. Heh.

After finally coloring, spending a good few hours, we released the images together, a couple of days later.

Word spread about on the SEGA forums, GameFAQs, then eventually worked their way up to Sonic Stadium Messageboard.

It was funny reading people pick off problems, then people claiming the images to be real. ^^ It really made me feel nice, knowing that I could create something that they considered official.

Eventually, it made it onto SonicAnime forums, then half a week after we released the images, SEGA finally decided to release an image of Shadow. So... Shadow looks sorta the same. Same body pose, face looks more Uekawa styled, and the hands are in his trademark pose that he's had in SA2, and Sonic Battle.

REALLY! TRY A DIFFERENT POSE ALREADY! EVEN BLAZE USES THIS POSE. How unoriginal...

anywho, we decided to finally pos our work, let it be known. I'm expecting mighty flames, but oh wel. I drew something for once.