The Question of the Day is a way to facilitate community discussion to help members ponder the unanswered questions of the world that are somehow relating to the hobby. Questions are many times open ended and up to interpretation. Feel free to post your thoughts in as much or as little detail as you’d like.
Helpful Considerations may or may not help some people focus their answer, these are blurred to not bother those who have their own ideas.
This is a cool prompt idea! I wonder if AI could take a sampling of a given artist’s card artworks and then generate what a different card they didn’t illustrate would look like if they had
In any case, my favorite artists are Komiya and Fukuyama, so essentially anything recreated by them would be neat to see. For Komiya, I’d like to see his rendition of any of the early Tropical Wind cards:
I love the vibrant colors and early nostalgic style of Fukuyama’s artwork, and I feel like it matches well with the vibe of Himeno’s artwork within the Jungle set. Seeing a Fukuyama version of the Jungle Eevee would be a dream!
3 cards with a bit of wasted potential here.
-Chubby Venusaur doesn’t look great imho, and it would have been cool to have a trio illustrated by different artists (Sugimori, Arita, Nishida?)
-Dark Donphan is meh, very static art for a Pokemon that is supposed to be angry, charging at things, running, and so on. Arita or Himeno would work miles better for Dark Pokemon
-Golem ex. Not much to say: a beloved Pokemon turned into a green reptile or whatever that is. Just call Ueda and redo all these poorly executed CGI experiments
Most modern artworks kinda seem lazy and cheap to me, while I do think the digital artists are talented and it still looks nice I do believe that hand painted artwork looks better (sorry to any digital artists) and with the amount of money Pokemon makes I believe that they could get artists that can make beautiful artwork
If arita could make artwork like this on a random card, imagine what artists could do with a lot of money backing a single artwork and the time to make something perfect
Question from a non-artist here: how do you tell if something is digitally made or hand drawn? Sometimes cards look hand drawn to me, but that applies to both vintage and modern (though more so for vintage certainly).
And as a follow up, how does someone like Arita produce art now vs 20 years ago?
I knew something didn’t add up, maybe zoom it out a tiny bit but this would work wonders. Instant bump from I-want-to-forget-that-this-exists to top half Base holos.
This question is difficult to answer honestly. I feel like choosing another artist seems like a disservice because I love ALL of the arts for every card. If it was a brand new card Id have to look into the artists themselves and get back to this question.
wow, dang. Thats probably like Shin-ichi Yoshida’s best art. Thats a real burn. Though I’d say yeah, it doesn’t feel “dark” at all. Just normal looking donphan. Good art, but the prompt was not followed.
I feel like the early cgi cards are all awful and aged like milk. This golem has ugly lighting is the biggest issue with it. Its somehow both underlit, and blown out in the highlights with a weird color cast. Even for the time, it could have been done better without even changing the character model. Also the lack of dynamic poses for most 3d renders of the age is a let down. But if you know you know when it comes to changing poses.
im not so good at identifying the difference. I know some artists use styled digital tools to make things look like pastels, colored pencils, water colors and paintings. But I tried to look at some of the examples and they seem too perfect so I assume they are all digital. But if anyone reading this knows for sure there is a hand drawn/painted modern art please post it.
That said, yes the digital era is here. Everything is very sterile in a way I can’t describe when looking at that squirtle vs. Dragonair. I think this is why there has been a boom to film photography, no matter how good the tech gets, and it now far exceeds film, the physics of film still has an appeal. The same goes for a lot of stuff. People are getting very fond of the physical process and its end results over digital. Pokemon moved away from this look fast. I suggest looking at early MTG cards too. That game came out much earlier, so the tech wasn’t even there for its formative years, and even once it hit its stride.
Thanks for sharing. It doesn’t detract from the many high quality arts we now get, but I would love to see what happens when you stick a pencil, pen, or brush in the hands of all these artists too.
A lot of modern cards are still hand drawn or hand painted, they’re just done digitally rather than with physical mediums. There’s thousands of digital brushes/tools you can use and it’s still a lot of work with its own skill required. Usually it’s the texture differences that give it away but it can be hard to tell
I do agree with squirtle that a lot of the digital cards aren’t as engaging, the digitally painted ones (like the gallery card they posted, and a lot of the galleries) typically look great but the ones done in a more flat style (like the special delivery cards) don’t always translate as well
This is the only rapidash art I’d replace, its honestly pretty to look at but the back leg sticks out to me every time I see the card, it looks human and all I see is the lamp from home alone Always wanted to see a clay card for this evo line so I’d probably replace with yuka morii
This must be unpopular but almost all gold stars. I’m not the biggest one of Masakazu Fukuda and even if some of the gold stars are very nice i feel like there’s a lot of lost potential regarding the artworks.
Always wanted to see a clay card for this evo line so I’d probably replace with yuka morii
