Weekly Art Practice - Week 32
This week is another shift in the weekly format. So along with the regular subject studies, and anatomy studies, I want to try to work in a “finished piece” once a month (even if there are only 2 left…). For me a finished piece mostly just means fully rendered to a degree where I’m happy to share it on socials. These will mostly be chosen from current internet art trends or challenges as I like to know my theme going into the week.
The theme for this week is the Pokemon Ability Forms exercise. All Pokemon have an ability, this is usually between two abilities with some Pokemon getting a 3rd hidden ability. Abilities will provide Pokemon with an extra, often passive, mechanic during combat. For example: Pikachu most often has the ability Static, which means that when an opposing Pokemon makes physical contact with that Pikachu, there is a 1 in 3 chance the opposing Pokemon is paralyzed by the static.
The idea behind this challenge is what if a Pokemon’s ability changed the way the Pokemon physically appeared. So a Pikachu with the ability Static might have static electricity jumping all over its fur. I heard of the exercise from a recent Drawfee episode and did some research to try to find the originator of the exercise and I’ve come to believe it was started by n0rtist with this Tumblr post (Sounds like it may have been a Tweet first but Twitter is impossible to use now).
I like it as a challenge because it’s a design challenge with an existing character. So not a full head to toe design but working off of basically one word and a one sentence description to make changes with.
But anyway this is a lot of preamble for a blog post, let’s get into it.
Day 1 - Research & Sketches
I spent a decent amount of time scrolling a list of all Pokemon and reading their abilities. I wanted one that had 2 basic ones and a hidden ability to have 3 characters to draw. I went with Omastar because I have a soft spot for him after his role in the original Twitch Plays Pokemon and I wanted to keep drawing ocean creatures. He also has 3 abilities that I was able to imagine some solid visual elements right from the get go.
After doing the research phase I did some quick first idea sketches:
Day 2 - Digital sketches
Instead of bringing my hand sketches into a digital format I re-did them in CSP to spend a little more time thinking about poses and design.
Day 3 - Swift Swim
For Swift Swim I wanted longer tentacles for swimming but also a slightly more aerodynamic shell for faster movement in water.
Day 4 - Shell Armor
I was torn between how big to go with Shell Armor, some of my earlier sketches definitely had more of the body covered but it ended up looking to diaper-like to me. I’m pretty happy with the helmet look though.
Day 5 - Weak Armor
Weak Armor was probably the hardest design wise. How I conceptualised it was that on hit, the weak armor would break off and this makes the Pokemon faster as it’s carrying around less weight. Possibly even has some cool regenerate ability but I wasn’t sure how to visually represent that. So I just went with some big pieces being knocked off but still ready to fight.
This one is pink because that's the Omastar shiny variant.
Conclusion
Once completed I put them all on a page with some experimental design so it wasn’t just a plain white background.
I really enjoyed this project. I don’t do design stuff often so it was a nice creative stretch. Dividing it into 1 character per day was also a nice breakdown as they each only took 1-2 hours depending on how confident I was in the sketch and after I figured out the painting method I wanted to use. It’s probably not noticeable but I did a light, textured white paint over the base colours to tone down the colours a bit. Original Pokemon artwork was in water colours so a lot of Pokemon art tries to emulate that and I liked the slightly softer look it gave this.
I used a web app to get the Omastar name in that font: Pokemon Fonts Generator