Staryu! Pokemon One a Day!

Reblog on Tumblr: bonnyjohn.tumblr.com/post/8062…

Star Shape Pokemon

Water Type

Staryu has made its way to Pokemon One a Day! Well actually, it’s made its way to a rock by some waves, all in pointillist fashion, inspired by the perfecter of the post-impressionist style,Georges Seurat!  

I’d been meaning to do an impressionist  piece and I thought Staryu was a good pick in that I could illustrate a more traditional sea star with all its bumps and textures in a stylized fashion.  I was going to with broad strokes in a more traditional manner so I sought to use a brush that would really usher in the look and feel of unique individual strokes by switching to Corel Painter instead of Photoshop.  I would end up using both for this work - PS for drafting and defining and CP to finalize the intended direction.  

I used a reference shot of a sea star to get my template down - I’ve done a lot of representational works as a means to present the creatures in a way that highlights them for the style of the day - profile shots or straight away from the front almost all of the time.  Thus, I decided to mix it up by introducing a foreshortened look at Staryu to spice things up in terms of presentation of form…Not to mention we got a little but of a background here as well to round it out even further!  

I introduced the background because Staryu on his own just looked a bit too plain; you could see he was planted somewhere, but floating about in space looked too empty on the white of the canvas.  The background would be the last bit I would work in, so let’s focus on the first and main part - Staryu.  I wasn’t responsible for personally creating every single point seen here.  I kind of took a shortcut - as I had my impressionist plan in place, I browsed about CP, a program I barely use, when I found none other than a Seurat brush.  

No seriously, it was labeled Seurat!  I’m sure PS has a brush like that elsewhere but I decided to give it a spin and found it worked as advertised.  It should be noted that my piece isn’t like a traditional Seurat in that the color palette is too bright and the application of pointiliistic marks are too chaotic.  Still, it carries its voice and presents yet a new style I can say continues this daily challenge along, diversifying the illustration from its brethren.  

So there you have it!  What do you think of this work?  I’m very happy with this result and ushered a new sorta benchmark for this one.  Kinda looks like Pokemon TCG illustration, doesn’t it? XD 

Thanks as always for reading my write up and for viewing and hopefully enjoying the artwork!  We’ve got a really awesome week that will start the coolest, most interesting, badass, and most importantly diverse roster of Pokemon to wrap up gen 1.  Stay tuned, friends, family, and lover(s)!  

Yours,

Bonny

+ Pokemon One a Day is a series illustrated and curated by Bonny John in an effort to represent the the first generation of characters from the world wide phenomenon that is known as Pokemon.  The idea is simple - to draw and share one new Pokemon a day (weekends off!) until every Pokemon from the set is completed.  This project is an exploration of fine art styles for learning and leisurely purposes.  

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