One of the first animes I was exposed to as a kid, was the adaptation of golion in the united states, better known here as Voltron. It was huge back then, and at the time there was an influx of really cool japanese toys and cartoons that seemed to capture all of our attention in the 80’s. Getting an imported voltron for christmas that year lead to countless hours of play for my friends and I. As the years went by, my nostalgia grew, while my interest in watching the original series waned. So many of the classic cartoons I’d grown up with didn’t age well, either due to lack of quality animation, or incredibly repetitive storytelling.
A few years back, netflix rebooted the series, and sparked our entire family’s interest. Fresh takes on the characters, great plot outlines, and quality animation made it a must watch for us. When I ran across a little contest online, I felt inspired to illustrate an entry for fun. Even though it didn’t win, I was pretty satisfied with how it turned out.
The linework and greyscale for this were done in clip studio paint. However, a lot of paint work was done in photoshop for this one. There were a lot of effects and textures involved to get it to a point that I was happy with it. There are so many colors involved in voltron’s design that it really had to be fine tuned to be a successful piece. I also found myself playing with the compositional elements a lot more than I usually do. While the initial motivation was for a contest, I really only aimed to make something that I would want to hang on my wall. Regardless of the outcome, I’m really happy with how it turned out.
