Hi, everybody!

This is (hopefully) going to be a short post.

Incase you didn't know, yesterday the Sonic YouTube page dropped a video for their 35th anniversary fanart exhibition that's going to take place in L.A. later this month.

To cut to the chase, my artwork is going to be in it!!!!

Now, when I first got the email about this exhibit, it was back in July. This was after I had made the art celebrating Sonic's 35th birthday. It was a short email from the Sonic the Hedgehog newsletter. It basically announced the fan art event and that it was accepting submissions. It had a link where you could send in your art to be featured.

Then it asked you to fill out a brief questionnaire saying what game(s) your art was based on and what the inspiration was behind it.

Now, this is bad, but I admit I wasn't too descriptive on the details at this part. I feel like I should've wrote at least a paragraph that was more in-depth. But I only wrote a couple sentences. However I did say that my main inspirations were Sonic Adventure, Sonic Unleashed, and NiGHTs into Dreams.

And yes, I purposefully sent one without my watermark on it. I felt as though the framing and watermark would take away from the full picture of Sonic himself in some way.

I had already made the 35th art, and there was no reason not to at least try to send something in.

So I figured, oh what the hell, why not?

Though as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, I slowly started to doubt whether mine was actually selected. There would be a lot of people to choose from, I knew that much. Sonic's got a big community of fans after all.

And out of all those people, the chances of my little artwork getting picked weren't that high in my mind.

In fact, the other day, it was on my mind again. And I said to myself, "I feel like I would've heard something back by now. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. At least I sent it in within the window of time. If I hadn't sent it at all, the chances of getting picked would've been zero."

Not my train of thought verbatim, but something along these lines.

After that, I went and checked the criteria (yes, there was a criteria!) they judged the artwork on.

After I saw this and read the rules, I felt a little bit better about my chances. My drawing seemingly checked these particular (albeit vague) boxes. Still I thought, "Out of all the Sonic fans, there's no way they'd pick me!"

Boy, was I wrong.

As Sonic himself would say, "I'll make you eat those words!"

Or... those thoughts? Eh.

Anyway, I'm super happy to have gotten in. I wasn't feeling great right before I got the news, so seeing this really lifted my spirits. Seriously, I'm gonna have to do something to celebrate. I don't know what yet.

Now, I was going to see if I could arrange a trip so that I could see the exhibit in person. However it's such short notice that it'd be difficult to do so. Plus I'm going to be right off the tailend of another trip around the time of the exhibit. But if I do go out there, I'll definitely take pictures.

And it was really nice to see how many artists were featured! Even some veteran familiar and unfamiliar names. I'm happy to be among them. Thank you everyone for sending in your awesome artwork.

There are people following my Twitter because of this. I haven't posted to my Twitter in YEARS.

...

Anyway... that's all I wanted to say. Thanks for reading!

Oh, and if you haven't seen it, here's the newest video uploaded to my channel: