Sonic:
I basically used the same character design ethos that the designers of Sonic Boom used: to make the characters less ‘rounded’ and ‘mascot’-like and instead try to give more hints of their personalities. So I made him spikier, more triangular, and gave him a little band-aid on his muzzle as to indicate that he’s very proactive, like many japanese characters of that kind have. But I essentially went back on most of those decisions after looking at Naoto Oshima’s original drawings and reminding myself of how much I love them, and then also looking at hedgehogs and seeing how round they are (especially their ears, their ears are nooothing like those jackal-like ears I gave him at first). So that made me come up with the newer version, and a new baseline: Make the designs simpler and more classic Sonic-like.

His gloves are based off of formula one gear, and his shoes are supposed to kinda look like an F1 car a little bit too. I even thought of giving the shoes a bunch of stickers like an F1 car. Thinking back on Sonic, when I was young, I always associated his shoes a lot to F1 cars, aesthetically, especially since how pointy his shoes were. Doesn’t help that Sonic himself was plastered all over F1 racing at the time either! I also think it’s very cool how the belt on his shoe is based off of MJ, but white belts are really wack and never really put too much attention on how cool that concept is. Also I thought that making his shoes and gloves less simple would give attention to them and make up for the lack of other accessories.

Tails:
My original sketches of him was me trying to make him more red panda-like. Eventually I also went back on all of those for the same reason I did with Sonic, of me loving the original drawings too much. Many western depictions of Tails, maybe because of the unfamiliarity with the kitsune legend, always casted more light on the fact that he has two tails than the japanese canon, which just accepted it as some quirk. Was it some sort of mutation? Was it Robotnik’s doing? I gave it a slightly different color due to that. The bandage was also me calling attention to it but it’s such an unnecessary silly detail in retrospect. I also like him with the pilot helmet and goggles on, maybe he still wears it when he’s piloting the Tornado.

Knuckles:
The first thing I defined for him is that he’d no longer be the guardian of the Master Emerald. It only detracts from him being a character of his own and ties him to a silly rock. Why would he be a treasure hunter if he knows the value of preservation of lost cultures exactly were they are, away from everyone else? Why would he do anything else when he has to sit all day on an altar looking after a big crystal, isolated from everyone else on a flying island that can’t be reached? Whenever I feel like I need to put him to do anything I need to hold the Master Emerald hostage? It’s silly. I focused instead on him being the strong person who’s very blunt and antipathic-looking but that has a heart of gold, but that is also kind of a knucklehead (duh, it’s in his name), which I think is where his character lies. I also thought of him as some kind of bounty hunter.

I like how Knuckles is black-coded, even if it’s a weird mix of black-coded things that only japanese designers could cook up, giving him dreadlocks, jamaican shoes, giving him a mix of rap and jazz to play as his theme… I especially like how in Sonic Adventure 2 they even gave him a darker muzzle to boot, which I also incorporated on my design. It’s a shame that after SA2 they completely forgot about those things. Ah, I also tried to change his gloves so it’s clearer that they’re supposed to be boxing gloves (a lot of people don’t realize that and think they’re weird mittens). That was a bit of a challenge in the color department since boxing gloves are usually seen as red, blue or black, colors that wouldn’t quite work there for a few reasons. Brown boxing gloves exist but the color is associated more with other kinds of gloves, so I figured the star would help in that.

Amy:
Canon Amy is very little more than just ‘Pink Sonic’ and I hate it. Her whole character is ‘girly girl through the gaze of a boy’, so she’s ‘annoying’ and ‘clingy’ in very shallow and stereotypical ways. Whenever I think of Amy positively I feel like I’m cheating and thinking of her in ways and a light that the creators wouldn’t put her in (like how I think of her DITCHING SONIC AND MAKING HER KISS BLAZE THE CAT A LOT), so I basically changed her wholecloth to make her her own character instead of being something in relation to Sonic (which is why she’s not a hedgehog anymore).

I wanted to tie the characters better to the game world of Sonic and that’s where the idea of making her a spring witch came from. I figured she could also have a very bubbly personality to boot.

Sally:
I like Sally a lot. I like her as a leader-type. She’s also very convenient because one of my goals was to shatter the weird sexist rule that Sonic characters have in their design that girl characters need to be fully clothed while boy characters need to have only gloves and shoes on. As I said before, my goal was variety, so I wanted characters with all sorts of clothing combinations. Anyway I figured she’d be the leader type this time around too, the glue that ties the team together, hyper-competent even though she doesn’t have any special abilities that the rest of the team has, kinda like Robin from Teen Titans. She probably lost one of her legs in a mission, too, and maybe sometimes in dire situations she can panic due to the trauma, but most of the time she seems unphased, probably always trying to bring the team together.

Rouge:
Not much I can say here. Spy/thief type, you know the deal. Inspired by Carmen Sandiego. I imagine she works as a secretary for the city mayor, spying the mayor (who I thought could be Robotnik in disguise, as that would explain why he has so much money for his evil schemes, he controls the political game to fund himself), but then she would /also/ have another identity as a jewel thief. Maybe her thief name is Red Rogue (get it?? Rouge, red??) and hilariously nobody makes the connection.

Shadow:
At first I was ready to not even attempt to redesign him. He’s such a mess of character tropes. Did you know that Shadow is: an alien, who’s also a genetic experiment to heal Dr.Robotnik’s aunt of fictional AIDS, who’s also based on Echidna ruins depictions of Super Sonic and thus that makes him his edgy/dark counterpart, who has amnesia, who now works for the military as a genetic supersoldier agent a la Solid Snake.

Yeah. Wow.

So, from all that mess, I decided to focus on his military theme. He even has an eyepatch in the sketch. Due to my new design baseline I decided to streamline and simplify him though, especially since Knuckles already has a jacket. I think the gloves and shoes give enough of a hint of the military-ness without being overbearing.

Jet:
I thought of Jet as some cocky speed rival to Sonic, which I think is what the designers of him originally thought him as, as well. His hairstyle is like Sonic’s but backwards, his ‘skin’ color is green and eye color is blue (which is the reverse of Sonic), and he might’ve been originally based on a peregrine falcon as well, known to be the fastest animal, even though he’s canonically referred to as a ‘Hawk’ (probably because of Tony Hawk, since Jet appears in Sonic Riders, the hoverboard Sonic racing game). Jet suffers a lot from looking too close to the ‘Sonic mold’ so I changed him and gave him proper wings and tried to make him look more like the aforemented falcon.

Blaze:
Another thing that I thought of, in regards to variety, would be to also represent different cultures, like Overwatch does (even though those original sketches are like, a couple of years old, I think), so Blaze is Chinese in theme, after all, she is from “a faraway land”, so to speak. I tried to make her more cat-like in some fun ways and her redesign is one of my personal favorites. I imagine the jewel on her clothing is what grants her fire powers and that she’d have a sort of introvert personality, much like canon Blaze, but even moreso. Her whole design theme is “restraint”, with the tail tying her clothes together, the tie on her hair, the sleeves covering her arms completely. I figured she must exercise a lot of self-control since fire is such a volatile thing, which also ties into her lonesome personality.

Espio:
Driving home the ninja theme harder, I also changed his muzzle and eyes so it looks more chameleon-like. His tail is also supposed to look a bit like half-shurikens.

Bark:
The sonic series has a huge lack of girl characters, and varied girl characters and I didn’t want to repeat species, so I ‘switched out’ Big the Cat for this Bark the Polar Bear girl re-imagining. I imagined her as a very sweet and protective but very guillible bear. The chest pattern is supposed to kinda look like a sweater.

Vector:
Kinda mashed together elements that I like of his old and newer designs together. I think of him as a music nerd who works at a music store. He probably had a short-lived band with Sonic too and is an old buddy of his, Knuckles, and Espio, but all from different points of his life/different friend circles. That’s how much of a cool guy he is, he just knows a lot of stuff and people from weird places because he’s so outgoing.

Metal:
Again, mashed elements that I like from his Sonic 2, Sonic & Knuckles and Sonic CD appearances. Not much else to say.