“Before we hand you in to the sheriff, how’s about you cough up what you have?”

Self Critique: Before I begin, I do have to contend with the fact that work on this began in 2020, so some early-stage things I critique myself on may not be relevant to what I can do now. But regardless, I’m not really a fan of how I drew her legs from the knees down. This likely stems from using my Body-chan and not a 3D model, hence why they look like that. This was also before I’d get that TBLeague female seamless model, so getting a body-chan to cross the legs in certain ways is not that easy since it’s plastic. Now even though I did get a male TBLeague model for the miniboss by the time I got to him, I still don’t like how I drew his raised arm. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Ambition finally meets skill! 5 years in the making, I finally finished Annie (and the Stage 1-2 midboss) from Wild Guns. Well, I say 5 years, but this was something I tried to do since 2016, right around the time Wild Guns Reloaded was first released. The first attempt was back when I still used GIMP and scanned the preliminary sketches in from my sketchbook, but it never got beyond that point. The old plan was to put her on a chair with a revolver in her hand, and place her in the Carson City Saloon. But the scope of it all was pretty daunting, leading to my dropping of the idea. Of course, this all changed when I finally got the game on the Switch in 2020. I had more references to go on from the game and had a better idea of what to draw when it came to the background. One of the challenges in the beginning was actually pinning down Annie’s outfit as how she looks in promo art, Cover Art, in-game portraits, and her sprite art were inconsistent. I eventually settled on using a combo of her in-game sprite and promo art. Of course, this was only the beginning of the wild ride this pic went through.

As stated earlier, I used both my Body-chan and Body-kun to get the poses down. The idea was to draw her sitting on the miniboss that you fight in the saloon after he (and the big robot outside) are defeated, having him pass her his bullets little by little while she sits on his back. Of course, the revolver isn’t hers, but his (which is more apparent on any non-clothed variants having his holster visible and empty). Getting this pose down wasn’t necessarily easy since I couldn’t get the Body-chan’s legs the way I wanted it to, and I wouldn’t realize later on that I was making a big mistake with Body-kun (which I’ll get to in a bit). This was also one of the 1^st pics I worked on with a revolver in it, before Hannah Dundee. So I downloaded a 3D model of it off Clip Studio Assets, preferably one that I could bring down the cylinder as I was unfamiliar with the mechanisms of how that came down (reference photos didn’t really help me at the time). Once things were in place, it was just a matter of making sure her dress made sense and flowed around the miniboss correctly. But of course things in life, as well as other projects, got in the way and slowed progress on this way down.

With the miniboss, I only had his sprite to go off. So his face was up to interpretation. At first I was thinking of just giving him a blank face, much like you’d see used in anime/manga for random nobodies. But given the detail at play here, as well as how short the hair would be, that wasn’t gonna happen. I also decided early on to have him match variant levels with Annie, which means he also goes nude like she does with the variants. All throughout my time working on Annie and up to when I was working on him, I could shake the feeling that something was off with how I drew him, in particular his raised arm. By the time I got to him I was already using 3D models on a regular basis. So on a separate canvas I brought in the 3D model and put him in the same pose as the miniboss. And that’s when I could see it: His arm can’t naturally be front of him on the X and Y-axis and reach far back to where Annie’s hand is without breaking the joint. This is something that the Body-Kun doesn’t express since I can “break” the joint and it’ll still look unnaturally normal. I tried it myself, and sure enough the only way I can reach back while hunched over is to point my elbow outward toward the Z-axis. So I had to redraw that arm (as well as that part of his outfit). And just to make sure, I ordered a male TBLeague figure to get the skin and musculature right, or about as right as I could get it.

Once all that was done, it was time to do the background. And oh man from the get go this was not going to be easy. Both the original SNES and the Reloaded release have things done differently. I went with the Reloaded version for how things looked, but referred to the SNES version for some coloration and to figure out if something was either metal or wooden (since the Reloaded version doesn’t really make it all that clear with some materials here). Of course the view of the saloon from the game was head-on. And since this was made for a Gallery Shooter, it’s all presented like a diorama of sorts, even having its own scale and perspective that was made for gameplay and not “realism” per se. This was mainly an issue with the tubes and that large dome in the middle. The tubes to the right of the bar gave me the most trouble. Head-on, how they turn, flow, and overlap makes sense. But when trying to draw them in the perspective I was planning on, for some reason my brain just had trouble comprehending it. I even cropped that part of the stage and tried in vain to skew the perspective to give me an idea, but that didn’t help. Looking back I could’ve just downloaded some 3D models and match the in-game head-on view, then turn the camera to how I needed it to be. The dome was another thing that I wanted to try and incorporate, but knew that the perspective and angle was probably see it mostly cut off. That is, until I turned the pic into and 11×17 one (yep, this is another one of those 11×14 pics that I extended). That meant I can show more of it.

There were two things I wanted to truly express with the background here. One being the destruction. In the original game, you’re encouraged to destroy the scenery as much as possible for bonus points and items. And seeing as this is a post battle scene, I wanted to have broken floorboards, ceiling fans falling apart, a broken table, that welcome sign sparking, a broken beer mug, and bullet holes everywhere. Just to make sure I knew what was getting destroyed, as well as to draw them with the correct perspective, I sketched everything intact (except the table, that was already drawn destroyed form the beginning). Once I got to the 2^nd sketch phase, that’s when I drew the objects that would have parts destroyed using a different color for the exact parts. The other thing I wanted to express was the heat. In the SNES original, whenever there was a large explosion (like from the Screen Clear or a large boss blowing up), a heat haze effect would occur. Unfortunately, even though the explosions in Reloaded are FUCKING ORGASMIC, there’s no heat haze. While couldn’t express that here, it at least tells me that the environment here is hot. So I added a light smoke layer and applied a filter to it, increasing the density the further back it went. I also made the glow effects disperse more to sell the effect. Plus, it still makes sense to add the smoke anyway since everything was shot at and blown up. So it ended up working out in the end.

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Tools And Resources

Done on Clip Studio Paint 2.0
Wacom Cintiq 16 Tablet Used
Body-Chan and Body-Kun Models traced for construction lines
Male TBLeague traced to correct Miniboss’ arm

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Annie, Miniboss, Wild Guns and Wild Guns Reloaded © Natsume / Tengo Project