Val in the Lab

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!”