Valentina is the character I played in my friend’s Pokémon
TTRPG. I haven’t drawn her much since we abruptly stopped playing several months
ago, but I have a soft spot for Val and I couldn’t just let her be forgotten.
I actually started sketching the Val you see here while I was drawing my second
Witch Crys commission, in order
to get a bit more practice with wrinkles in cloth. I hadn’t originally intended
to draw her Totodile, Kyle, or the background at all.
After coloring in Val, I had a conversation with my violinist friend
about what makes art resonate with people. What separates us from an LLM that
spits out simulacra of art? Why do we keep creating when the computer can
synthesize an image that wins the Colorado State Fair art competition?
One of the reasons we came up with was that people want context. With context,
people can relate more to what they’re experiencing, and knowing there’s a
flesh-and-blood artist putting effort into art that means something makes the
feeling all the more powerful.
For me, fanart makes life seem a little less lonely. “Someone out there likes what
I like, and their expression of that fact made its way to my eyeballs,” is
a nice thought.
So anyway, that’s why I added the ever-crafty and excitable Kyle, and the rest of
Prof. Ivy’s lab where Val worked before going on a study broad in the TTRPG’s setting. The
lab is how I imagine how an actual research lab would look like in the Pokémon
world, and my head canon is that Ivy’s lab is part of Orange Islands University.
Her three lab assistants in Poké Ball Peril
are grad students or postdocs or something.
By the way, the OSHAwott Job Safety and Health poster is based on one of my old
works that I since turned into a sticker
you can buy!
When I finished drawing and coloring, the whole thing kinda reminds me of some of
the illustrations in picture books I read as a kid, though I’ve forgotten all of
them. Maybe it’s the greenish color scheme and the slightly sketch-like lineart
that makes it feel like there should be some Times New Roman that says
“It’s almost lunch! See Kyle run! The little Totodile would run a mile across
the tile for oodles of noodles!”
