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. I made two versions: I finished this Latios
one first, then replaced Latios with Zircon for the
Palentine’s exchange version.
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.
