Time Drawn: January 2013
I’ve long had a problem drawing “cute”. Cute requires a delicate use of lines and shapes that is thrown off by the proportion errors that plague my art. A lot of people can manage it easily. I am not one of them.
It might just be my love of detail working against me. The easiest way to manage cute is with very simple clean shapes. Just look at Hello Kitty to see what I mean. She’s the epitome of cuteness via simplicity.
And while “cute” might seem like something that an artist could live without, a lot of the elements that make up “cute”, the simplicity, the clean lines and shapes, the empathy via art that makes us think of babies and puppies and all those cute things in life, those are things that I really need to learn how to do to go forward in my art.
Thus, I drew a Bulbasaur.
One of the best ways to overcome a deficiency in your art, or in fact any aspect of life, is to find someone who’s doing what you want to be doing and copy the heck of of them for a bit. It’s far faster and far more effective than trying to figure it out on your own.
And well, Pokemon are excellent examples of “cute”. It’s part of why the brand has survived so well for so long. Well, the truly excellent video games don’t hurt in the least (yes, I’ve played just about every handheld Pokemon game from Pokemon Red to Pokemon White 2, and loved every last one of them.) So between their mastery of cute and the love I have for the series, I’m now drawing Pokemon.
Standard legal stuffer-ma-bobber, Bulbasaur and Pokemon in general don’t belong to me, they’re owned by Nintendo and Game Freak. I’m not going to sell this art since the characters don’t belong to me, and I’m posting it merely as a fan of the series, not as someone who owns any part of the series.
Well, unless you count the individual game cartridges. Those I own.
And I do have a Bulbasaur. His name is Bulber.
