This post is meant to be a reply to ’s journal entry, in which he say that he’ll stop drawing pokemons… since I found to have a lot of things to say about drawing pokemons I decide to write them all in a journal..
[PAY ATTENTION: loooooooong text below this line ]
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As many people here on DA I’ve two accounts: one for more serious stuff/portfolio, and one for pokemonish things. This is not because I think that pokemon are childish and simple: I instead think that they represent a solid base for illustrators and designers, because they teach you to understand the basic principles of drawing and they train you to disassemble reality and reconstruct it again maintaining just the necessary, the essential traits of an object: actually, despite what many people think, simplify is more difficult than complicate, cause you need to be aware of what you’re going to draw, in order to comprehend what you can keep and what you must rub out.

In order to learn this, pokemon are the best preparation, because they also teach you how to thinking laterally (by consider an animal or an object in a way you never did before), how to make things fit in established world with its rules (by searching for your fakemon an elemental type, a method of evolution, an ability, a position in the environment) , how things develop and transform themselves, and not just add something to their basic structure (evolution), and above all, how to take something in reality and transform its inner nature so that it reminds its real counterpart but at the same time is something completely different and even more appealing.

Anyway I just want you to know that your pokemon have been a great source of inspiration for me and your art were one of the reason that drive me to get a brand new account just to try myself into pokemon style. I personally really enjoy in try myself into different styles , cause it makes me understand how a drawer thinks and which traits of a character are emphasized by that particular approach to drawing. Someone who can manage different styles is someone who is so clever to allow his brain to comprehend several way of facing reality and you, Lydario, do it: your pokemon fit perfectly into sugimori style, while being unmistakably a Jeff’s art.
Your abandon of pokemon makes me feel sad, cause I definitely think that you are the only one who reach the right compromise between talent, inventiveness, and right approach to sugimori style and satoshi tajiri world, and I know that we’ll proably never seen again such wonderful concepts as yours.

The day I will feel that I’ve done as much as possible with pkmn, I’ll probably stop from drawing them, but at the moment I will certainly continue drawing that pocket monsters because I still find them interesting. But one thing is for sure, I will continue the same way to follow your art
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Actually I was planning to write this things before reading lydario’s journal, and it was going to be my version of “why I love pokemon”… but I really love lydario’s art too, and I felt that it was important to turn the entry into a reply, because I always thought that lydario really caught the entire creative process that lay behind the creation of a pokemon, and that’s why he is a brilliant artist even when he draw little stupid creatures from a children’s game