Go, Blaziken!!~

I’ve been working on a new art project recently, and it got me thinking back to things I’ve worked on over the years including a picture of an older May/Haruka from Pokémon I once did.

Anyone viewing the picture will note that it’s not all that impressive and there’s plenty wrong with it, but for me, this is the first time I felt satisfied about something I drew… er, traced… er, adapted… ?

Okay, let me explain what’s going on with all of this. I’ve never been any good at drawing anything, no matter how hard I try, I have the imagination and I know how things should look when drawn, the problem I have is that I can never get whatever I draw by hand to look anywhere near the way it should when drawing pencil to paper or through any other form of physical drawing. This extends to handwriting as well, I just can’t get my hand to do what I want it to do, my fingers are absolutely terrible for small precise movements, they have absolutely no finesse.

It’s a problem I’ve never been able to overcome and it has completely discouraged me in terms of doing anything remotely artistic. However, there are many ways to create things, some create pictures using pencils, ink, paint, some people sculpt, some create art through photography. Now, I’m not saying I’m an artist, I’ve never considered myself to be one, but I do attach the term “creator” to myself. I like to create things such as web site designs and although 99.9% of what I create is nowhere near original or good or noticed or whatever, I have still created something, and that makes me happy.

“Go, Blaziken!!~” is something I created using Adobe Illustrator. The Blaziken in the picture is a 100% trace from a picture of a Pokémon card I found on the net. I simply used it as a way to learn how to use the program. May/Haruka, however, is something that is a kind of composite image of several different images of the character that I found on the net. In fact, I referred to close to 100 different images in her creation and although I used many pictures of her as a reference in her creation, what you see is a completely new pose of the character… it is NOT a trace.

This entire image went through quite a number of changes and you can see that in the “Making of Go Blaziken!!~” image I posted above that show you various screenshots I had taken of the process of creating the image. The initial plan was to create a team of six Pokémon surrounding May/Haruka, however, that would have taken a very long time and would have inflated the project way too much for a beginner level project. What I did end up with was a simple picture that I was actually happy with for once in my life.

For me, the creation of this image was a really valuable learning experience and helped me to realise that there’s more than one way to create something.

As mentioned above, I’m working on a new art project recently and that new art project involves a similar method of creation, using reference images to create a composite image that I create in Adobe Illustrator. I have no idea how long it will take for me to complete that image… rather those images, but I do know that it will end up being a little more complicated than this picture of May/Haruka and her Blaziken.

Either way, it does feel good to do something like this again… and maybe I’ll post up some more posts like this about stuff I’ve created in the past.