From what I understand, it's kind of a standard for most forums to have an art subforum. Needless to say, I was still SUPER pumped to find out that there's an art section here! You can skip all of this if you want, since I can't expect everyone to read an essay on the art history from some internet dude you've never even met before, but I'd like to give a little bit of background... Spoiler: Unnecessarily Long Monologue Back when I was a very little kid, I was OBSESSED with Pokémon. I wanted to talk to everyone about it, I wanted to play it a bunch, and so on. I had some ideas for fanmade Pokémon that I had written down, most of which were extremely uninspired, blatant ripoffs of other Pokémon, or both, but I still loved it regardless. I never tried anything beyond very basic sketches on some paper though, none of which even had color. Most other kids didn't care but I still had fun, so there was no reason to stop. When I was in about 5th grade (i was like 9 or 10 or something), I remember messing around on YouTube a lot, finding myself just about anywhere in the Pokémon side of things. At one point I found myself in some Pokémon Fusion section where a spriter took 4 or 5 sprites of different Pokémon and combining them, as the name implies. I figured I'd try it myself. I spent a good amount of time on it, and it was hard, but I finished. Needless to say, even as younger kid, I knew that what I had made was terrible and kinda felt discouraged from coming back to it. At Halloween around 8th grade, however, I was bored and didn't have much else to do, so I decided I'd go back to Pokémon Sprite Fusions. I spent even longer on these, but they actually didn't look horrendous. They were still awful, but they were a huge step up from before. I thought it looked spectacular and I showed just about everyone. I did this for a year and ended up making around 60, only one of which I still consider to be even average. I then stopped for a while since I didn't have a computer at this point, but I did end up getting one at around the end of 9th grade. I used it for Pokémon Showdown and stuff, but I never really came back to making pixel art until the next summer, when I had the idea of a cloud dragon. It sorta stuck in my head for a month or so because I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do a fusion again or make something from scratch...but I finally decided to make it from scratch. I was done, and it actually looked decent, but not spectacular. Needless to say, "decent" is miles better than "mediocre," so I proudly showed everyone just like before. This kind of got me back into the swing of things. At this point, Sun and Moon were about to come out, and I started browsing Smogon to see what the pros thought about the new Pokémon. I wandered around the forums for a bit until I saw a thread called "The New First Gen." I was kinda curious, so I clicked it, and it turns out, this was a competitive format centered around adding Fakemon that would then be added to a Smogon fangame! I was hooked on the idea. I posted my cloud dragon, an old asteroid design from when I made fusions, and I also had now sprited the ideas for two other new designs, one of which is my favorite creation to this day. The subforum seemed to like them decently, except for one guy, which just told me I had some improving to do. Over the next year, I made a bunch of designs and sprited them all, and since I pumped them all out so fast, many of them were designs that I'm not proud of today, but it was still great practice. Now here I am, just graduating high school, and I've been spriting off-and-on recently due to lack of inspiration. I still do make stuff from time to time though, and I think my sprites are a bit more accepted among that Smogon subforum. I feel like I've come so far as an artist, but it's impossible to be perfect, so I know I'll always have something to work towards. Now onto the art! Spoiler: The Fun Part - For those of you who read everything above, this is the cloud dragon, Monstratus. This is a very very edited version of my first sprite I made from scratch, and it still has some rougher parts...I think the wings and head could be better at the very least. Overall it's not too bad though. I imagine this one as an Electric/Flying-type with Cloud Nine and Drizzle as abilities. - This is Spirox. I originally made this for a Smogon thread, but it stuck with me as my favorite design to this date. I currently have some art a friend made for it as my avatar on one of my social media sites! Anyways, this is a Ghost/Steel-type (coincidentally my two favorite types) with the ability Battle Armor because I would imagine it hiding in its box to take hits better. This is based on a jack-in-the-box, and I imagine a ghost posessing a metal box for this one. I also have this as one of my only "mythical" designs, so that's why it has only one ability. - This is Valianch. I had the idea for a wooden knight as a kid, but I hadn't really done anything with the idea until I remembered about it a few years ago, and now here we are. For a "lore" aspect, I imagined its body moving very slowly, so a vine grows from out of its back, wraps around its sword arm, and can make it move very quickly and precisely. This is obviously a Grass/Fighting-type, and I think it would have Justified and Chlorophyll as abilities. - This is a weird one, and because of that I need to do a lot of explaining which you don't have to read...There will be a "tl;dr" at the end. I should first say that this was made for a Smogon thread that I run. I would tell you all about it but I'm unsure if it'd be considered advertising or not, so it's best to not take chances. Anyways, something I had to do was to make a Pokémon based on a name and a typing, nothing else. The typing was Fairy, the name was Baloon. That's right, it's just the word "balloon" but missing an L. I wasn't forced to make this design, but I had the thought "how on earth does someone make a design based off of the name Baloon and nothing else" so often that I actually came up with something. I imagined this as a real-life balloon animal, where in order to give it limbs, you'd have to pinch a part of the balloon and you'd end up with a teardrop shape. Those teardrops are its arms, and the reason its chest is so so tiny is because that's the pinch. I also gave it a string and a circle at the end, because where I lived, strings have those at the end to make it easier for kids to grab. TL;DR, this was meant to be based on a realistic balloon stick figure, the name was randomly made "Baloon," and I felt like trying to come up with something for the design. That's really about it. Obviously I've made more than four sprites, but since I've been only doing things off-and-on lately, for the other sprites I've either saved them to be posted later or scrapped them as a whole. Either way, that's all for now. Thanks for checking out my thread! Let me know if you have any criticisms, questions, or suggestions for designs!
Despite me making this thread literally yesterday, something I don't think I ever mentioned is that I won't post on this thread very often due to my "lack of inspiration" thing. Expect a bunch of posts early on, and not that much after that. But I have a special little treat for you guys! For those of you who didn't read the entire post above, I mentioned that I made a bunch of Pokémon Fusions in 8th grade? Well a few months ago, I actually found an image of all of them on my old tablet! It's VERY low quality because iPads like to convert all images into jpegs which does not work at all for sprites, but you can still get the general idea of how horrendous they are, especially if you zoom in... Spoiler: Garbage You might have to zoom in to see it better, but this is just a mess for so many reasons that I'm not even going to begin to explain because it would just take so freaking long... I'm sure many of you can see a lot of the issues here in the first place. The only one of these that is even remotely good is the asteroid design at the far left side of the red row, and even then I did a terrible job spriting it. Safe to say I've improved a good bit over the past four years, right?
I always find that looking at old art is great for seeing just how far you've come! I can definitely see some improvement!
My favourite one is the one in the red box, far left. Looks really cool, and has a neat gimmick. I wonder what the ability of that would be, maybe it puts the Gravity effect on the field as long as it is on the battlefield, that would be neat, albeit broken in doubles.
Very surprised to see anyone say anything positive about the middle school garbage! Anyways... - This is Komodith, which is a name that the same old random Pokémon thread came up with, although I think the name Modolith is much better. It seems to be a combination of the words Monolith and Komodo, so I designed this as such. I actually just finished this sprite like yesterday after a few hours of work overall. Something interesting about this is that this is actually partially an older design that I reused for the random Pokémon thread. My original design was named "Ferram" because I forget why, but it was a dark gray spider with metal spikes coming out of its back, and though this doesn't have spikes coming out of its back it's pretty close. Since this thing has the metal coming out of its back, I also made it have claws, ears, and an underside all made of metal. Looks kinda simple, but still pretty unique, right? Well... - Yeah this is Ferram. Not nearly as big of a fan of this design as Komodith, and I actually scrapped this a long time ago. This was one of my earliest sprites I made from scratch (like 2015) so I think I was still finding my footing there. Not a terribly-made sprite though, and not the worst design out there. Just not good enough for me. - This is a small flounder that I don't really have a name for yet. Heirofishic? I dunno. I mixed in design aspects with heiroglyphs, since I imagine an ancient drawing of a fish could resemble a flounder at least decently? I dunno but I think the two mix nicely together. This sprite's not completely finished, I might make it a bit bigger and I'm going to make the blue pattern look shiny rather than the sort of "deep glow" I failed to achieve now. I made this two weeks ago, which was around when I started with Komodith. This was just a quick sprite I made just because I thought it'd be fun and interesting, but I'm still pretty happy with the result. I also might have forgotten to center it... - This is Electritar. I made this for the random Pokémon thread as well, and I'm not a huge fan of its name, so I prefer to call it Shockstar instead, which looks extremely bland until you realize that it's Shock + Rockstar. Being perfectly honest I don't remember making this, though it must have been in the past few months because the thread for it is somewhat new. This isn't my favorite design I've made but it's not bad, and I think a few tweaks in some areas (I don't know where) could turn it into a great design. That's about it for now!
- I guess I forgot to center this one too but this is Flychotic. This was made for the randomized Pokémon thread a few months ago just like Baloon, except the name I was given was Crazefly, which is terrible so I call it Flychotic when I use it. I messed up the perspective on the abdomen but other than that I'm happy with this, I've had people call it "cute" which apparently applies to most of my art. Not that I'm complaining though. This is a Bug/Psychic-type, and in the randomized Pokémon thread it has great stats all around, with incredible HP and Sp. Def especially, but only barely above 90 Speed and a pitiful 30-ish base Defense. It also has Galvanize and Rapid Spin. - This is Corell. I made this about three years ago in my huge Fakemon craze I had, where I made a bunch of lower-quality designs that I thought were all good that only really lead to me improving a bunch. I actually mostly made this because I thought I could do some interesting stuff with the color scheme, and I did get a lot of compliments on that if I remember correctly. This is a Water/Rock-type Coral Oyster Pokémon with Shell Armor and Regenerator, and like Crazefly, it has a lot of special bulk but no physical bulk. But that's not all... - ...this is what Corell looks like with its shell flipped open! I made this sprite edit later in 2018, and I'm really happy with this one. Look at how grumpy he looks! I also spent a lot of time positioning the opened up shell and making it look like it could close just like the sprite above. Didn't take as much time as the stuff I make from scratch but I still had to put a good amount of effort to make this one look as good as I could. - This is Cadbunny. It's an Easter Bunny! It's made of chocolate, has half of an egg shell on its head as a helmet, and has easter egg patterns on its torso. What's not to love? Once I get around to making a pre evolution, that's gonne be an even smaller bunny in a basket! Though I considered making it a Dark-type to imply that it's dark chocolate, that wouldn't make too much sense, so it's just a Normal-type. Pickup makes way too much sense for it because easter egg hunting, and it would probably have Run Away as well to fit in with some of the other regional rodents. That's about all for now. I'm sorry for the inactivity but that's only what should be expected here. Thanks for the patience!
If I'm not mistaken I said earlier that this thread would be quiet? If I didn't then now you know to expect this from me, I don't really do much artwork but I have made a few things of note recently... - This is one of my favorite creations and one I only made recently, Hyperoach. Another Fakemon for the random Pokémon thread on Smogon, but this time, I forgot that I was making a Pokémon while I worked on it. I can't see a real Pokémon having a facial expression like this or mashing two completely random ideas together but the Pokémon in that thread mostly wouldn't fit into the mainline games anyways and I thought it was funny. It's red because my favorite sports team is red and my favorite number is 10 so I made that the number on its jersey. - Another random Pokémon thread creation, this is Flamyle. It's an unfinished sprite based on a missile that obviously is in the process of blowing up. If I end up using this for other projects then I think it would have an ability to reflect this, it would probably boost its Fire and maybe Poison attacks by a huge amount but reduce its HP by a quarter each turn? This wouldn't really fit as an actual Pokémon either for more obvious reasons. The biggest things I need to fix are the cloud on top and maybe the mouth, this is a remade version of an old sprite and the cloud on top looks awful. - ...okay, not a Fakemon, but I want to post this regardless. This is Mawpire, an unfinished Mawile edit I made for a sprite contest for another website. This contest involved making a variant of a Pokémon to possibly be featured as a collectible on the website. Unfortunately I didn't know I had to make a Mega Evolution for it so I was never even able to submit it, but I doubt I would have won anyways since that site tends to favor things that are way too overdesigned for my taste. Either way, I felt like it was worth sharing; I put a ton of thought and work into this sprite edit. That's all for now! Thanks for reading!
Didn't even notice that my last time posting here was exactly two weeks ago, I just made a post similar to this on my Smogon thread for art and I felt it'd be nice if I were to post this here as well... - This is Rinsect. I based it on a Japanese diving beetle and not much else. Pretty simple design here, I made it have little flipper things on the ends of its arms and I gave it a hollow shell filled wth water. I'm not sure whether I made this in 2017 or 2018, although I'm leaning towards the latter. Last thing I really can mention here is that its evolution will have many more scuba diving aspects thrown into it, with a few possibilities being an air tank on its back that holds water instead and a scuba helmet to go with it. - This is Grievenge, another one of the earliest Fakemon I've made, just about when I made Monstratus and Spirox (from the first post) in 2015, and for the same Smogon thread as them as well if I mentioned that in here. It's gotten a bunch of slight revisions since then though, although I might continue working on it now, especially since it feels kind of empty in the chest area. Obviously based off of the grim reaper except his head is an eyeball. Not the best thing I've made I don't think but it's not bad at all, and it's definitely better than most of the things that came from around the time when I made it. - This is Monstratus's Evolution. I made this as a Mega Evolution at first and every time I looked back at it, I noticed how bad it looked, so after many looks and minor tweaks, I decided I'd just rework the whole thing from scratch. It doesn't work much as a Mega Evolution anymore, so I just use it as a full-on evolution and rename the base form into "Monsirrus" since it's small enough to be a first stage. I've been told that the ears look strange and that the cloud surrounding the wing on our left looks too flat, and I kinda agree with both. Matter of a fact, there's a BUNCH of minor little issues on my sprites that need fixes (and some even need full redesigns) so I'll probably make a post soon enough where I fix all of my minor issues, assuming I do get around to doing it.
Hey guys. I've been busy, but I finally have enough stuff to warrant posting here again! - This is Flamepion. For my random Pokémon thread, I got a Ghost/Fire-type with that name, which I could only assume was meant to be "Flame Scorpion." However, we already have a scorpion named Scorpita, and I can't imagine making a dead flaming scorpion...So I looked up other stuff to base it on, and I came across the word "lampion," which means "Chinese lantern." Perfect! Then I came up with this design, and some Pokédex entries to back it up. They'd describe lanterns being hung to ward off ghosts from festivals, but this failing miserably as the ghosts just possessed the lanterns to cause more trouble. I imagine there'd be a pattern on its back, but you can't see that obviously. - Remember when I mentioned Scorpita? This was going to be the design for it, but someone beat me to it. This is a sandwich-based scorpion, because "pita bread" was too good to not use for the design here. His tail is a kebab, his claws and legs are made of veggies, it shoots poisonous mayonnaise out of its tail, what's not to love? - Big image, but for those of you who haven't saw, I won the Ghost Fakemon contest here not long ago! I won't go too into detail about these, but the post for that is here - https://lakevalor.net/threads/design-a-ghost.25083/#post-580578. That's about it! Hopefully I don't get demotivated to make stuff because this college semester ends tomorrow and I have plenty of ideas. Hopefully I'll be posting here again soon, thanks for reading!
Have quite a bit to share today, so let's get started. - Remember when I posted Flamyle earlier? This is a Flamyle redesign, and it's not the last redesign I'm posting here today. I wasn't really happy with how this looked before in all honesty, but after a pretty big design change, I can finally call this done! I made it look a lot more like a nuke while also making its face fit into the design a lot more naturally. The last thing I want to say about this one is something I can say in my next piece despite it being so different, so I'm not going to say here. - This is the only 100% new Fakemon I'm posting here, named Ostria from my random Pokémon thread on Smogon, but the name Treemu is so much better for it so I'm calling it that. It's a tree bird if that wasn't obvious, and it also just so happens to be my first sprite of 2020! I'm happy with how I started, I had the opportunity to make his face look like this so I did and I love it. With both this and the new Flamyle, I had to learn how to make things look like they'd grow out in unpredictable ways for a lack of better terms. That would make them both look much more convincing. I'd say I did a pretty good job even if I had to ask a friend for help! - Lumineel redesign! This one is named Cliety, taken from Clionidae (the scientific name of what it's now based on) and diety. My biggest issue with Lumineel was that its design was kind of all over the place. I think it was sprited pretty well, and I still think it's cute, but its design needed to be based on only one thing. This is based on one animal, which fixes that problem, and it keeps the sort of cutesy look its old design had, even if it looks completely different now. Since I completely changed the color scheme, a friend mentioned making its old color scheme in to its new shiny, so I think that's what I'm going to do. That's about it! I may post again very soon, but I don't know. Thank you for reading!
This is the first time I've made two posts in one month on both this thread and its Smogon counterpart, I'm happy that I'm finally making enough stuff to warrant posting on them again! - This is Azurolt. I mentioned in a post I made back in November that I was going to make a Rock/Electric golem-based Pokémon, and as of today, I'm finally done with that! This was originally for a Pet Mod that aimed to recreate Gen 1's Pokédex, but since then the leader has shut it down. Reason it hasn't been done yet is because I haven't been proud of my past results when trying to design it - I've had several ideas floating around between August and November, and I hadn't really been proud enough of any of them to finalize their sprite. But it's done now, and I'm super happy with it! This is based on golems from folklore as I said earlier, as well as mixing in aspects of geodes and crystals / some kinds of gemstones (can't remember which) making good conductors of electricity. Based the name around azurite / volt. Just for fun, I'll share a few past revisions of this design... Spoiler: large image inside These three images are all from 2019. What I made above is just a heavily changed version of another idea I had a few days ago. I redid my idea for this thing A LOT of times. - First one here, didn't get far into it obviously because there were some really rough parts. I was at first going to make its body shape kind of like Heatran's but it looked too potato-like so I scrapped this pretty quickly. - Much bigger image, I'm sorry, but here are some other ideas I had. You can see where this inspired what I have now. I felt like sketching some ideas to share with others and see what I liked. One on the far left is the one I got closest to finishing in the end, but I never went through with that because it looked kind of generic to me. Second one over was an attempt to make it look a bit more interesting, but I thought it was pretty strange. Third is a generic "pixie" idea, since the Pet Mod I was doing this for had this Pokémon replacing Mew, and the far right is based on a magic wand. I might go back to the wizard or magic idea later, but both seemed really basic and kind of lacked inspiration. - The last one of these I had polished the lines a little bit for the one on the far left. I was going to give it the legs of the one next to it (aka the legs it has now), but kinda just stopped before there because this sprite had so many issues and I didn't feel motivated enough to finish it because I wasn't super super happy with the design. - This is Pterrost, an Ice/Dragon Pterodactyl I made back in 2018 I believe. This was one of the last sprites I made before taking a huge hiatus and this is a sprite I spent a good amount of work on back then - I went back to it to change a lot of minor details constantly, and I was struggling to come up with how to pose it. Extremely loose and kinda stupid premise behind it is "what if a pterodactyl ended up surviving to the ice age?" I think was supposed to have an icicle for a tail but you wouldn't be able to see it from this angle, which is an issue I probably should have thought about while spriting it. - Last Fakemon of the post is Pristhorn. I made this sprite just before making Pterrost, I think when I was at a friend's house for a party. Every generation has introduced a feminine plant-based Pokémon since Gen 2, possibly Gen 1 if you want to argue Tangela being based on Medusa but that's kind of a stretch. This is my take on that, based on the Devil's Claw, a kind of plant mostly found in deserts and used in some kinds of medicine. Looking at these two sprites right now makes me immediately notice a few mistakes I've made, but I'm still pretty happy with them. Also, a new project I'm doing - starting a few weeks ago, I had the idea to make a new Discord avatar based around a different Pokémon every week for the rest of 2020. I'm not doing it for every week because I've missed a few, but every week after the 12th of January. I'll probably post a bunch of those as well whenever I post here. Here are the first three, though - Spoiler: 1/12, 1/19, 1/26 For every three weeks, I'll be rotating between a Pokémon I chose, a Pokémon a friend chose, and a Pokémon RNG chose. Conveniently enough, we're three weeks in, so I get to post one of each today. - For my first pick, I chose Clobbopus. SwSh is still somewhat recent, I like having cuter Pokémon as my avatar, and Clobbopus is my favorite Gen 8 Pokémon, so why wouldn't I choose it first? The outlines of the picture won't be visible on Discord so I would have shown blue parts of where the hands start, but nobody would've seen that anyways so who cares. I also made the face like my avatar on here (AKA the one I had like all of last year), but unfortunately the eyes were hard to see on Discord. - For my first pick from my friends, the first that responded wanted me to do Porygon-Z, which I was happy with. I like PZ a lot, and it's a pretty simple Pokémon to draw. That being said I probably could've put more time into the outline for the eyes. I would have done some crazy pose if I had any ideas for what I could do, but it's pretty for me to come up with something like that, especially when I don't want its face to be covered up too much and it's mostly a headshot. - For the first RNG pick, I got Pansage. Not a huge fan of Pansage but I don't really dislike it either. I literally just finished this before posting, making it the second of two sprites I've started and finished today (first time in a long time I can say that line). Or it WOULD be finished had it not been for me noticing I completely forgot to polish the bush on his head in any way. It's pretty late here, so on top of that being a problem, I've probably screwed up the linework in some areas that I just can't notice because I'm too tired to notice them or something. Unlike Porygon-Z, I DID come up with a good pose for it, which lead to me coming across a weird issue - how do I make it point with its oven mit hands? Pretty happy with what I came up with there but it took a good amount of time to finish that part alone. That's about it for this post. Not sure what other Fakemon I can really make in the future, but worst comes to worst, I can probably post here again in a few weeks with my next set of avatars. See you all next time, thanks for reading![/SPOILER]
