adventure 1:1 start

Some fanart I did for this piece:
[link]

Here's the original writeup:

"Help me, get my feet back on the ground/Won't you please, please help me, help me, help me".

As the last chords fade away, our young heroes are left with no excuse not to start this new day's adventure, but the infinite skies are so vast and free, where would they even start?

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So, Spindy made one of the most popular pieces on Y! a little while back, and disappeared again shortly after. I've been in contact with her, and she expressed in interest in having a sprite done up; naturally, I picked her coolest damn character ever, Shins. But being an idiot, that was hardly enough for me, and I went beyond making a sprite, and went all out.

For this picture I used a common SNES screen resolution which was used for most sidescrollers (256x224, if anyone's interested), and tried to mimic how backgrounds were done in games; you'll see sprite blocks on the floor and in the far skyline, as well as a cheap gradient on the sky. The shadows I cheated and used transparecy; normally games would display shadows on alternating frames, but since I'm using a static screenshot I mimicked it by making it transparent. The HUD and text windows were and afterthought, but made from scratch. I wanted to have status portraits on the textboxes, but I didn't have the time, effort, or skills. The font is actually, surprisingly, Arial Bold. I tried my best to keep similar colours as the original, but I really did the background no justice whatsoever; Spindy's is just freaking awesome.

I liked doing this, a lot. I still have a ways to go, but it looks alright, right?