This was pretty much the first set of images of Blade ever, not counting a quick doodle of a few of the characters in a lined notebook with a pen, just so I didn't forget a few things I'd mentally decided on before sketching up this image.

This was primarily drawn to focus on Taiyo as a lead singer and size Blade up to him (get an idea of how their differing body shapes looked on paper together), but listening to a song whilst ended up making the image that much more complicated (well, I got inspired and wanted there to be more going on than I had originally planned).


As you can see, though, I had a pretty clear idea of how Blade was going to look right from the beginning. Only minor details have changed and rather than being really changed, they were just smoothed out/clarified (or, in the case of his goatee, grown out - I notice his nose has gotten a bit... smaller, though).

This is also the first image to really utilise the frame-concept that I decided was going to be something of a 'Musicpsycho' trademark (even if it would just be a sketch like this one, it would have a border like this around it).


Lyrics in the image, BTW, are from Sonata Arctica, which I have to attrribute to being a HUGE, HUGE inspiration for the band. It was listening to them on my iPod during a long-ass roadtrip that I came up with the rest of the characters (I had Taiyo, Marijke {who wasn't actually an 'original' member decades ago, but I knew I wanted her involved this time around} and Rowen, already, it was just a question of who'd fill in the missing roles as guitarist, keyboardist and bassist? Those became Blade, Axel and Katya respectively).


The backstory here is that about a decade ago, I decided Taiyo was going to be a singer and Rowen was a drummer. Then a friend of mine at the time admitted he liked to write music and his character could play the guitar, so we formed a fantasy band called "Eyes of the Storm" (I think we actually considered it hard rock/metal, even - although, back then, I had Josh Groban and Enrique Iglesias on the brain where Taiyo was concerned).

I lost contact with this friend (have since resumed it, sorta), but when I decided to revisit my old Mewtwomorph, Taiyo, I knew I wanted to revisit his musical group too. Listening to Sonata Arctica made it clear that this was just about exactly the right singing voice for my accented mewtwomorph.

In this particular song, there were two distinctive voices and an umbreonmorph guitarist with a slightly deeper tenor voice was 'born' in my head. (Although I was on the verge of picking der Graf from Unheilig as his 'celebrity voice' over the other singer from Sonata Arctica - dropped that when I heard Nu Pagadi's "Hellfire" and Amorphis' current vocalist Tomi Joutsen, who are both a better match to Blade.)



Anyway, Blade and Taiyo (and Musicpsycho) belong to me.
Lyrics belong to Sonata Arctica.