Coco, Crash & Dr. Neo Cortex

About the artwork

Fan artwork featuring Crash Bandicoot, Coco Bandicoot, and Dr. Neo Cortex in a richly detailed laboratory scene.

Story behind the artwork

Back in 2024 I felt I had started pushing boundaries I've never pushed before as an artist. While other completed work usually was created over the course of years, this was started and finished much faster. I made sure to put a lot of focus on the piece, and I really wanted to push number of detailed characters, and background. And I wanted to do an original setup of characters, something I now felt I could pull off.

So I started to imagine different setups, but decided to just go with the flow and let the pen decide. The sketch and the ink come onto paper rather quick, the idea just came to me to place Coco in the front looking all confident, then add Crash and make him look funny and a little clueless with that TNT, and Cortex lurking in the back as if I thought he could win his battle against them. But then came the hands. Oh lord I hate doing hands, and for some reason, each and every hand on this piece came out like a total nightmare. So bad I put the ink-work away for a whole year!

Then came a surge of inspiration and I decided to try my best to fix the hands with clever overlapping techniques, dark colors, and clever use of the background. At that point I didn't know what to put in the background, that just kind of flew onto the paper as I started working. Tubes, gauges, steam, glass jars. I then started color the characters using markers. After they were done I decided to do the entire background using only color pencils, to get a destinct difference between front and back. I afterwards layers transparent gray over the colored pencils, except the water tank, this made the tank (which I am most proud of) pop a bit more.

If you look closely you could probably spot most of the errors and old overlapping lines still in the prints, but that makes it even more fun to look at!"