Steven & Zircon

I drew this for a Palentine’s Art Exchange on Bulbagarden Forums. Everyone signs up with a list of prompts they might want to see drawn by a randomly matched forum user, which could involve canon Pokémon characters, OCs, or a mix of both.

The prompt I drew was of Steven Stone together with Zircon, the Lati@s-inspired OC by my match. Their forum profile pic is Steven Stone at the Safari Zone (I think), so I’m drawing for a real Steven fan.

I originally came up with this composition at a board game shop with my friends, while waiting for my turn in Power Grid. When there’s about six of you playing a board game where you have to make complex decisions, the mid- to late-game slows down to a crawl. One of my buddies, who takes the longest, adopts what I call the Game Winning Stance: when it’s his turn, he stands up and leans over the board, propped up on the table by the left arm, and a handful of pretend money in the right.

Each turn, his actions become more and more complex― his game tokens were placed all over the board, cards shuffled around, and play money exchanged in ways that would make the CFO of Enron blush. I sat with my sketchbook, glancing up occasionally to see what madness he had unleashed upon the game. A long couple hours later, the game ended.

He didn’t win the game.

Anyway, I wanted to go for a pose with really striking foreshortening, kinda like with Green in an Egg Chair. The thing that really got me onto the foreshortening thing are the illustrations in some of KIRA and Giga’s MVs, which have really punchy visuals to match the tone of the music. In the end, my foreshortening still ends up a little subdued, but I think the end result is still dramatic enough, especially with the sunset lighting.