Advance Wars Collage ft. Eagle, Grit, Sami, Hawke, Sasha, Andy, Sonja

Created by Danny Poloskei on 2021-07-31
Medium: Paint Tool SAI
Comments:

Inspired by free shipping on a custom t-shirt printing website, I started drawing this one on July 6th. I've printed gaming shirts before and figured and Advance Wars shirt would be nice considering Re-Boot Camp being released later this year.

Anyway, I started with Eagle since he was my favourite CO when I played Advance Wars 2 as a kid. I recycled my Sami drawing (including the background) because why not? I was actually thinking of printing my Sami drawing originally, but it seemed underwhelming for a shirt. My other game drawings were also candidates, but I felt like none of them were good for a shirt since the characters weren't shown from a good perspective.

So, we had Sami and Eagle to start. I added Grit, who managed to replace Eagle as my favourite CO many years ago. What's not to like about his comedic dialogue and spamming ranged units? It seems Re-Boot Camp is giving him his cowboy hat from the Japanese Advance Wars games. I opted to stick with his American outfit since that's what I grew up with. A lot of the Japanese CO outfits are bizarre and seem out of place to me, anyway; I think the localized versions were spot on.

I decided to put Hawke at the top as the Black Hole representative since he's their coolest member and practically their leader. Sturm and Von Bolt look a little silly. I've never made a drawing like this before, I'm not sure if there's a name for it. Words like 'character tower' and 'collage' pop into my mind; that's as close as I can get to describing it. I filled it in with a few more characters so it wouldn't look so empty. Andy seemed like an obvious choice since he's the face of Advance Wars. I wanted more female representation, so I added Sasha. I wanted a Yellow Comet representative, as well; I was thinking either Kanbei or Sonja. I ended up going with Sonja to balance out the male-female ratio a little more.

Well, so that seemed like enough characters. I did most of the line art on July 6th and 8th, then I didn't touch the drawing again until the 29th. Cutting it pretty close to put it on a shirt since the free shipping was only for the month of July! I went at it hard and got it done in time. I recycled the background from my Sami drawing since it seemed usable enough. I originally had the Advance Wars logo at the bottom, but didn't feel good about including it since it isn't my work. So, I made my own Advance Wars imitation logo. It was a mildly interesting experience, though a bit tedious. It took an hour just for that!

Time taken: 12 hours and 0 minutes (not including the drawing of Sami and the background, which originally clocked 6 hours and 35 minutes).