Pokémon is my favorite video game franchise. I find the game quite comforting since the main campaign is single player. The diverse and iconic designs was a major lure for me and many others, especially considering there are over 1000 Pokémon. I could go at length explaining what my favorite games are and what my favorite Pokémon are, but I'm not going to do that here. Why you may ask, because I already have a Pokémon fansite right here! (Spoiler Alert: I called it, I would have a new team of Pokémon lmao) Here, I want to focus on Pokémon's impact on my art practice and art pieces directly based on and inspired by Pokémon.
One piece that "was inspired" by Pokémon is the above piece. This is one of
pieces I created during my senior year of high school for AP 2-D and did appear in
my AP Show towards the end of that year. My central investigation surrounded the
interaction with nature. This piece depicts a dystopian future where humanity has
expanded their industrial empire further north, exacerbating the situation polar
bears have to deal with thanks to high emissions of greenhouse gases melting the
ice caps and their habitat. Their situaton is made even worse thanks to the
introduction of a robotic wyvern that has brutally murdered a polar bear mother
while her cub can only watch helpless against the mechanized menace.
The Pokémon inspiration comes through with the design of the mech dragon.
The dragon takes on a similar build to wyverns (dragons with their wings attached
to their arms) and the Pokémon
Noivern (left).
The shadow of the dragon's head also is reminiscent of
Salamence (right).
Working off the dystopian future where mechanized animals exterminate endangered species, a robot tiger with blades on its legs and serving at its tail aids in the deforestation somewhere in Asia and taking down an Asian elephant in the process. It's caustic, saber teeth puncturing deep into the elephant's jugular coupled with several slashes caused the mighty pachyderm to succumb to its wounds and bleed out. Its tusks will most certainly be sold off to some ivory market by whoever controls the robo-tiger. While this one does not have an immediate Pokémon that served as inspiration, one of my other teachers asked if this piece and the prior one were Pokémon since he was aware of my hyperfixation. Obviously, I could not actually use Pokémon for these assignments as that is blatant copyright infringement
This is a piece that uses an already established Pokémon. Done for an assignment for my comics class, I created a comic where I had met a creature. The requirements for this comic were that each page had to have at least six panels and had to be wordless. Because I used Charizard in a previous project, I decided to go with Blastoise as I have an afinity for the dual cannon-ed tortoise. I'm especially proud of the twelfth panel since it took me a while to nail Blastoise's pose, but it worked out really well. The water coming from Blastoise's cannons I still find clean as I just "balled" with an alcohol marker. Although I do not own the copyrights for Blastoise, my teacher was okay with me using a preestablished character for this comic.
This is just straight up fan art, but I felt i needed to include this since I will eventually redo this. The inspiration is Ash Greninja from the Pokémon XY&Z anime. Since I am not the Pokémon anime protagonist Ash Ketchum, I thought it would be fun to create my own Battle Bond Greninja design. I've been revisiting this every now and again since as with many artists, I look back on my past art and want to change a whole lotta things. If you are interested as to why I specifically lean towards Greninja, I talk about it more here .
The leftmost image was an early attempt at Battle Bond Greninja when I was new to digital art and didn't have Procreate so I used ibis Paint X (around 2021?). The middle image was my first attempt with Procreate after I got it in senior year (2022-23). The rightmost image is the last attempt before the main one I showed above. I used several images for lighting reference and based the pose off Greninja's render from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Generally, they all the same elements: blackish gray skin, Some red in the head, whether it is on the main crest or side crests, and some band around the arms. Notable changes include how I draw the side crests and a change to main crest from red to blue (since I got my hair dyed blue). The most recent one just sticks to what is present on Ash Greninja normally with some additions to colors on the forearms.
A yearly thing I have done for the past three years (something I might do later this year too) of drawing Sceptile in a snowy winter wonderland. Sceptile has been one of my favorite Grass type starter Pokémon. Even when I reevaluated my opinons, Sceptile only dropped down by two places now being my third favorite behind Decidueye and Torterra. I primarily chose Sceptile for a Christmas instead of an Ice type Pokémon because of Sceptile's tree tail as it looks like a Christmas tree. The first time (top left) set a pretty good baseline with Sceptile assuming a quadrapedal stance with a Santa hat and star on its tail. Lights adorn Sceptile's tail, but it is only on this one. The second time (bottom) I used Mega Sceptile as it had a more bombastic tree and more colors (I like colors). Last year's Sceptile (top right) is in my opinion the best as all of Sceptile's digits look normal and I went back to regular Sceptile wearing a bandana with a Sceptilite on it. Also, I used some of Procreate's brushes to make the snow look more natural.
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