Good thread! I’m also an artist, trained in classical animation and working professionally for over a decade, so I get where you’re coming from. Arita’s 3D work was some of the worst I’ve seen, I always thought he was forced against his will to do them.
I made a post awhile back in the Unpopular Opinions thread that seemed to ruffle some feathers, but I’ll paraphrase it here for relevancy:
I’ll pick on Ryuta Fuse because they did the main card I had a complaint about.
“This one is annoying because it’s such a cool card idea. But the composition I just can’t stand, it doesn’t flow like it should.”
“Obviously very rough idea I sketched out but I would have vastly preferred this composition, with Rayquaza spiraling into the center, looking back at the girl, while she walks and faces into the composition and her head is cradled by Rayquaza’s silhouette.”
“You can see here in the original there’s an awkward S shape on Ray, and the girl’s line of action is very straight and angled off the composition (doesn’t keep the viewer inside). I think the artist was going for a dynamic angle but it looks like she would fall since the horizon isn’t angled. There’s also a terrible tangent where they both meet. But most people don’t consciously notice such things. When you learn how to draw you start seeing it everywhere lol.”
Another one that always bothered me was this Charizard solely for the wonky jaws:
And lastly, I didn’t realize Ryuta did another one of my most hated modern artworks, the Dark Sylveon V:
Everything about this illustration bothers me. The drawing itself is anatomically poor, the volumetric rendering and shadow placement makes no sense. The style of painting looks like someone who just learned how to use dodge and burn in Photoshop. The strange lighting scenario. The moon is clearly out in the background, but Sylveon is full-bright with no cast shadows on the environment. It’s like an atomic blast went off, maybe Sylveon set it off herself idk. The grass tool. I just hate this image lmao.
All that said, Ryuta isn’t a bad illustrator. If we look at a few of their other works, they look fine, especially the trainers. It’s possible they are just better at drawing humans than pokemon.