Odaiba Day 25th Anniversary - Complete breakdown

I mostly shared progression of this piece as each character/scene was inked and colored, so I thought it would be fun to go back and show you all each step in it's entirety!

First off, here's the original brainstorming page I drew at least ten years ago (be sure to date your sketches, everyone!). I never really got into composition, but you can see that I ended up carrying over some of these ideas into the final project all these years later. Incidentally I ended up using one of these Joe poses some time later for a full pic, meaning two out of the three times I've drawn Joe he's been carrying a harmonica, haha.

Next up was the thumbnails I drew - I tend to start thumbnails super small so I don't get lost in the details much. Once I came up with the idea of Tai and Matt flying near Omnimon, the rest of the ideas started flowing really and the only one I ended up changing drastically was Sora, who ended up going back to her original pose so I could have a scene earlier from the series. You can kinda make out that I had Izzy looking at the globe from episode 19 as an alternate, but I thought that would be a hassle to draw in the end.

The rough sketch and sketch phase! I immediately ran into the problem of Tai and Matt being a little too small in the overall composition to be able to properly draw the finer details, so I had to draw them on a different canvas and paste them in. Agumon and Gabumon gave me no such issue.

It was when everything was finally colored that I realized I had to start figuring out what I wanted to do with the background (planning ahead is for squares).

I finally decided on emulating the backgrounds from the show proper and it ended up being really fun! Most of the scenes colors I chose for the BG are from the respective scenes minus Omnimon, since I felt the internet background would both clash with the rest and fade away into the white sides. TK's ended up being heavily lightened since his scene had a deep black sky and it was a bit distracting in the finished composition.

And we arrive at the final! This piece was took just over seven months of on-and-off work and I enjoyed every bit of it. I've never tried a composition this big or with this many characters before - 21 characters is quite a bit more than my six character Lesser Than Three group pic! I'm extremely proud of how this came out and I hope you enjoy seeing the entire process. Do you recognize which scenes I adapted? Which one is your favorite? Let me know!