This redesign of one of the original 150 Pokemon came about because of the Pokemon Redesign competition on CGHub. Here's the original Pokemon design:
(property of Nintendo, GameFreak)
The goal of the competition was to redesign a Pokemon so that it would fit in a live action movie, so anatomical accuracy was a key point in this contest. I didn't take too many process shots for this one but here we go:
This was the initial sketch I had in mind. As I mentioned in the Process Log 2: Sean, I'm still not comfortable painting in semi-realism, so the best way for me to start laying out the anatomy and form is to draw the line art and paint the colors on a separate layer on top of the lines.
Also, I want the point of most interest to occur around Victreebel's mouth area. The little bug that's hanging onto Victreebel's mouth is a Venonat (another Pokemon) who's colors would add a nice contrast to the rest of the composition I had in mind.
The initial sketch looked too stiff so I changed the whole composition and pose of the character to add more fluidity to the whole piece. Started painting the colors over the line art (you can see the line art under the colors here).
Painting in the detail on the main body. I looked up a bunch of reference pics of pitcher plants and the ones I found most interest in had these red veins branching out on their top leaves. I added that to Victreebel's leaf and main body, a little twist I gave it to differ from the original design. Plus, the red veins trailing down from the mouth seemed like a good way for the eye to travel across the composition. For the eye, I looked up alligator and crocodile eyes as reference.
Now moving onto painting in the lighting. I'm not too familiar with painting foliage, so getting the transparency of the leaves and even the main body was tricky. I looked up so many reference images, too, studying how the light travels through leaves. I also talked to a great friend of mine, Kez, for advice and a critique to get past this road block - she's a beast at painting foliage and creatures! Check her out:
http://kezrek.blogspot.com/
And here is the final image. Through Kez's crit, the top leaf's "pose" changed to make it look more readable, the spec on the lips were adjusted to match the placement of the light's source, and the shadows of the light traveling through the main body were enhanced.
The process of painting this piece was a lot of fun not only because I got to practice semi-realism more, but because the subject was a Pokemon. :'D I love Pokemon. My Charmander doll and Pokemon cards I have since I was 7 proves it. Victreebel isn't my favorite Pokemon, but the reason I chose it was to paint a realistic Pokemon you don't normally see on the Internet. When I search for "realistic Pokemon", I get a lot of the badass ones like Mewtwo, Pinsir, Kabutops, Charizard, etc., so as I was thinking of which Pokemon to paint I was like, "Hey, grass type Pokemon don't get a lot of recognition. Let's paint Victreebel cuz he's pretty cool." And then after that, Victreebel became one of my favorite grass types.
What I learned from this painting:
- painting light through foliage (understanding how light travels through leaves and transparent forms, nailing the spec on the surface of leaves and the lips of pitcher plants)
- practice painting points of interest, in this case, the mouth region
