The most common and simplest TF2 type of drawing that exists in the art community is dressing up different characters from other video games, cartoons and comic books or their own characters as Team Fortress 2 classes such as the Scout, Medic and Heavy. This is also known as a crossover. The last TF2 crossover that I did was with Street Fighter by dressing up Sakura and Ibuki as BLU Scouts stealing the intelligence from Zangief as the RED Heavy. I was originally going to make a sequel to that drawing by drawing Ibuki as a BLU spy because of the Spy's new Kunai weapon from the Shogun Update. Unfortunately, I didn't have much inspiration for drawing it because of the difficulties of drawing a female version of the Spy's outfit.
Just recently, I got my interest back into Ape Escape due to Playstation Move Ape Escape's release in North America. Not too long ago, I made a video called "No Dinner For You!" where I used the Heavy's quotes to be the Professor's voice and the Scout's quotes to be Kakeru's voice. That was when I decided to make a crossover between Team Fortress 2 and Ape Escape.
There were a few challenges that I have to overcome when I drew "Meet the Medicharu". The challenges were:
1) Choosing which Ape Escape character to draw
2) What class should that character be?
3) If the character is female, how would the female edition of the outfit look like?
1) I thought of dressing up the Professor as the Heavy Weapons Guy due to their similarity in physical shape. It was a good idea but I did not enjoy drawing the bullet vest around the Heavy, so the idea was scrapped. There were two other Ape Escape characters that I considered: Charu and Kakeru. I thought of drawing Kakeru as the Scout and giving him the hat the Scout got from the Uber Update, but it was immediately scrapped due to the difficulty of drawing Kakeru's hair. I do not want Kakeru's hair to get in the way. I may consider drawing him one day. In the end, I chose Charu because she is compatible with two possible TF2 classes: The Engineer and The Medic, which opens up numerous options. Moreover, I drew her more than any of the Ape Escape characters so I was very familiar with her.
2) Between the choice of making her dress up as the Engineer or Medic was a somewhat difficult thinking process. She could go well with the Engineer because she has the capability to carry heavy equipment and utilize her right hand as a weapon. She can also go well with the Medic because she is the only Ape Escape character to wear glasses in the anime [She wore glasses in Episode 18, Season 2]. It seems that dressing her up as the Engineer is the obvious choice, but there is one big reason that made me choose to dress her up as the Medic instead of the Engineer. Charu is designed to assist people around her, somewhat similar to how the Medic is trained to help heal his teammates in the battlefield. She is not meant to build and operator heavy duty machinery like the Sentry or Dispenser. Haruka is more suitable to be an Engineer than Charu.Therefore, the Medic class was chosen.
3) In my previous TF2 parody, I didn't much problems with drawing Sakura and Ibuki's outfit since Ibuki's doesn't need to be altered, and Sakura's lower part of her outfit was changed to a skirt. For Charu, I wanted to give her a long skirt like how she wears her maid outfit in the anime. The idea of giving her a long skirt was scrapped because I don't want to deal with the folding and cloth marks on the long skirt. I later on thought of giving her a short skirt, but it was scrapped because a Medic in the frontline needs to be fully covered to protect him/her-self. Finally, I decided not to make any alterations to Charu's Medic outfit and made her wear the Medic's original outfit. Her glasses is based on her glasses from Episode 18 in Saru Get Chu ~On Air~ 2nd, and I made the color of the glasses to have the same color as the Medic's glasses frames in TF2.
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| Concept art for Meet the Medicharu |
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| Pencil draft of Meet the Medicharu |
This is the pencil draft of "Meet the Medicharu" before I edited it on Photoshop. The development behind her expression was interesting. I was thinking of giving her a friendly and helpful look but it wasn't fun because I find it to be the most overused and boring expression in the art world. I watched Valve's "Meet the Medic" numerous times to grasp the Medic's mad emotions and expressions, and I realized that his expressions when he said: "Let's go practice medicine." and when he healed the demoman were the ones that I wanted.
The most noticeable and only change from the pencil draft and the one that I posted is Charu's left glove. I was not satisfied by how it looks like a glove made of cloth instead of rubber. Her left glove was the most difficult part of the drawing because I never drew or colored rubber before and it took me a longer time than I expected.
At the last minute, I thought of adding blood stains onto her clothing and the background but it did not turn out what I wanted on Photoshop so it was cut off.
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| Final Draft of Meet the Medicharu |
I really had a lot of fun drawing this tribute to my favorite First Person Shooter: Team Fortress 2, the world's most underrated video game franchise and android/computer program, and the late Tomoko Kawakami (She did Charu's voice from the first Ape Escape game to Ape Escape: Million Monkeys) who lost her battle with ovary cancer two months ago. It has been a long while since I last drew anything. I also hope that this drawing will motivate Team Fortress 2 fans and Ape Escape fans to come up with numerous ideas of Ape Escape and Team Fortress 2 crossovers. Ape Escape has a lot of potential when it comes to drawing crossovers and parodies, and it's a huge untapped gold mine waiting to be mined. One day, it may get the big break that it truly deserves in the video game industry.
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely,
TechieWidget
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