Jangmo-o
I drew the cute new Dragon Pokémon that was teased today. Drawn in FireAlpaca. Need to work on getting my line-weights consistent.
pokemon
Alola, Starters!
Today’s second post is a painting of the starting Pokémon from Sun/Moon’s new Alola Region. I painted this one shortly after the starters were announced.
Enveloping
Okay I had a nice weekend sans-Blaugust posts, and I’m still undecided about whether I’ll be making catchup posts.
In the meantime, I better get back to posting before I lose all motivation! I mentioned last week that I opened an Etsy store. Well one of the fun parts of having an Etsy store is sending out letters. Scribbling a thing on each letter I’ve sent out has been a good little exercise. However I’ve found it pretty nerve-wracking as I haven’t planned the drawings at all.
For first envelope, I decided to utilise the top right area for Zapdos’ head. Then I realised that’s where the stamps needed to go. So I rewrote the address upside down and put the stamps in the new “top right” of the envelope.
Lesson learned. I avoided that mistake with the following envelopes.
For the legendary trio I ried for a cute little design, I don’t think the brush pen was the best choice to convey such small little figures.
I drew this Moltres envelope while waiting for lunch. The biro was much less scary to work with. I don’t normally do shading/hatching like this but I think it worked out okay.
Pokémon Badges: Johto
I’ve made a few badges from Pokémon before. My Hoenn badges were 3D printed on Shapeways out of full-colour sandstone.
My Unova badges were also printed on Shapeways, but that was only the bases. The colouring and finishing touches were done by hand. I used acrylic and watercolour paints as well as liquid sculpey to create the glassy look in those badges.
Now that I have a laser cutter I can make the flat badges (Johto, Sinnoh and Unova) from laser-etched wood. I paint them and fill them with a gloss varnish to create the glossy effect. The watercolour paint bleeds into the varnish slightly, which can add to that enameled look in some cases and can be a hindrance in others. In addition to the paints bleeding, I also found that the burnt wood residues seep colour into the varnish! Compare the top set of badges with the set below. The varnish has done an excellent job of deepening the colours and making them stand out… but you can also see a yellowing that comes from the MDF. It’s most noticable in the Zephyr badge but the blue badges also suffer pretty badly.
I’ll be working to fix these issues but I think that overall these badges are working out nicely. One day I’ll finish the 3D models I’ve made of the Kalos badges…
P.S. you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been playing around with the look of the Hive badge. While the rest of the Johto badges had that uniform look, Bugsy for some reason decided to have a black-rimmed badge. Perhaps in a limited palette the concept of the ladybird didn’t translate well with a silver rim. Regardless, I decided I’d have no such inconsistency in my set. The Rising badge gets a little bit of red in its borders but I guess that’s the privileges you get when you train dragons. No way am I letting a kid bug trainer get away with nonsense like a differently coloured badge!
Prototype Aerodactyl Model Kit
Remember those awesome dinosaur model kits from when you were a kid? I’m working on a Viridian Pewter City Museum collection – Pokémon model dinosaur kits! This is the first, Aerodactyl.
I model the design in Blender first.
After making the 3D model out of flat planes, I mark out areas where the parts intersect. The model is then exported into a 2D file, using this excellent Paper Model Export script which allows me to set the scale of the complete model. After export, a number of things must be done to make each piece ready for cutting. The tail piece is shown as an example below.
Each point of interconnect initially gets exported as a normal “cut” line. This must be expanded into a 3mm wide line, and then the length of the line must be extended past the outline of the piece. Then the width of these lines is removed from the area of the piece.
Each piece is laser cut and the whole model can be assembled by slotting the correct parts together!
I need to make a lot of fixes to the design still but the overall concept works. Unfortunately the other Kanto fossils don’t really suit being made into model kits, but there are some good candidates throughout the series!
Sandshrew, Breloom and Goodra
I drew these guys while attending Adelaide’s Pokémon VGC event! Sandshrew was drawn as part of a Reddit collab where each artist would draw one Pokémon. You can check out the full album of art here!
Sparring Partners
Lucario and Little Mac! I think this was meant to be a prep sketch for a larger piece, but I abandoned it for some reason. The file has many layers with Little Mac in a few different punching poses. This is one of the more energetic ones.
Pikachu and Lucario
I almost forgot to post today but I’ll squeeze in a post and backdate by an hour. Since it’s late I can’t really think of much to say along with the art, so enjoy.
Not-Mega Monday
So I finally stopped procrastinating and started on more Megas for today’s post. And I drew a Mega Manectric I was pretty happy with.
And then I realised I’d made a rather large error.
Can you spot what it is?
If you compare this with the WIP of Tyranitar from last week you’ll notice that I’ve not laid down both strips of tape in the middle of the paper. My awesome Manectric sketch is completely misplaced! Luckily I realised before inking. You can see here that I’ve started to transpose the sketch further to the right, starting with Manectric’s snout. But as for getting finished art up today, wel’p, I don’t think it’s happening.
Oh well, there’s always next week!
Mega Monday #2
Well I was hoping to get all of the Generation 2 Megas done for this week but unfortunately I only managed to finish Ampharos and Scizor (Heracross was actually done last week, as I paired it with Pinsir).
My excuse for not posting Houndoom and Tyranitar is that I’ll be pairing them with Aggron and Manectric, respectively. Since they’re part of Gen 3 I’ll hopefully be able to share them with you next week! Here are some progress photos to prove that I’m not completely slack:
Doing all this art this month has been awesome, but it’s also been pretty taxing. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get all of the Kalos Megas done during the month but worst come to worst I’ll just put a couple of Pokémon up each week and stretch out Mega Mondays past the end of Blaugust.