Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi [Art Contest Entry]
Posted on April 24, 1991 by Christopher Galletta Stevens
Originally drawn as an entry for an art contest (of forgotten origins) about the video game  of the same name for the Sega Genesis that I did when I was 16 or 17 years old in May 1991.
19910429-SHADOW-DANCER-Secret-of-Shinobi-chrusher-dot-com
A video game about a lone Ninja and his faithful attack dog vs. an evil ninja horde. Yep, I'm there.
The original piece was vividly colored in colored pencil over my inks and sent in. Sadly, this very poor black & white xerox copy is all I have left of the piece, as in 1991, I did not have access to color scanners and printers. The scan from a poor-resolution xerox is the best I could muster without attempting the time-consuming task of recoloring it digitally. ( It'd be interesting, but why? Nobody cares. I see nobody writing any comments. :( ) After sending it in (to a now forgotten contest) I never heard a single peep again, and even with the extensive interwebz collective knowledge of the year 2015 (and occasionally after that), I cannot find what contest this was, who won it, why they won and what the prizes were. I looked a few times on a few search engines. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Edit: And years later, in 2022, the only mention I ever saw of it on any search engine again was... this very page talking about it! Wow. Did it even exist? Was I the only one who cared or entered? Anyway... This happened to me often and I just gave up trying these stupid contests. I entered a few of them when I was younger and became discouraged by never hearing anything, win, lose or draw. I almost never see evidence of actual winners, and on the rare occasions when I could actually see the winners, anyone -- impartial or not -- could see that they had often significantly lesser art skills than me at the time... so I figured I was either late entering, did something wrong, or the contest was either rigged or even completely fake. I don't like to toot my own horn (although I'm confident, I'm a very humble and soft-spoken guy), I'm not the greatest artist in the world or anything, although I have my own unique art style that I (and everyone I know) find good to look at... but even shy lil' sixteen-year-old me knew I was a better artist than pretty much everybody else my age that entered these contests (at least the ones we actually saw). Regardless of the contest, ninjas were a popular theme in my interests back then (and even now). Some of my favorite video games had ninjas (Ninja Gaiden, Shinobi, etc.), some of my favorite novels had ninjas (Eric Lustbader's Nicholas Linnear novels), one of my favorite toys and comic books had ninjas (Larry Hama's G.I. Joe comic with Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow and others), and my own comic had ninjas. I had ninjas on the brain! Still do! © 1991 Christopher Galletta Stevens @ chrusher.com [Found, scanned and web-published 4/24/2015, nearly 24 years later!]   PS- If anyone out there has this art (I doubt it, but worth a shot), or remembers this contest and anything about it... it would be a great internet feel-good story to contact me and let me know whatever happened about this contest.

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