Pixel Art: Fakemon
October 2023
October 2021 I participated in Inktober for the third year in a row. That year I thought it would be fun to make monster designs riffing on Pokemon using the daily prompts. I did a little digging and discovered that making fake pokemon was a big thing, and that there's a name for them: fakemon. I wound up designing 16 little monsters that year, and had a lot of fun doing it! I even wrote up fake entries for them as if they were in a Pokedex.
I don't have much experience doing 'monster designs' or making cutesy-esque illustrations, so the exercise was challenging in a new way. Part of the process was looking at some of the original 151 pokemon for reference. During my research I learned about the gameboy sprites; specifically this wiki page showcasing the different color palettes used captured my interest. While I didn't complete 31 illustrations for Inktober that year, I started figuring out how to turn the ones I had completed into sprites.
The original inked designs.
Specs
While the original pokemon Red & Blue versions were rendered in grayscale on the Game Boy DMG and Game Boy Pocket, they had color palettes when played on the Game Boy Color and...the Super Game Boy. I had never even heard of the Super Game Boy until doing this research. For my project, I tried to remain as faithful to these renditions as possible, which resulted in the following constraints:
- Each sprite would have a 56x56 pixel canvas.
- There are 10 palettes to choose from, each containing 4 colors
- Each sprite could only use one palette; no mixing and matching
Results
I completed a few in 2021 and picked the project back up in 2022 to complete the following "original" fakemon pixel pieces. Not all of the illustrations made the cut, but I was pretty happy with how they turned out overall. There were definitely challenges I had to overcome, as certain design elements just wouldn't translate directly to the pixel-art medium without causing visual confusion, etc. Some elements needed to be changed or simplified, like the tiny legs on Ticktock.
The ultra-restrictive color palette gave me an appreciation for just how talented the artists were when making the Pokemon sprites. The use of dithering to provide a 'fifth' color was a necessary skill I had to develop, too. Thankfully, Aseprite offers some basic dithering tools that does the job for you, which made the whole problem more approachable.
The finished pixel art pieces at the end of 2022.
2023: The Sequel
Designing legible silhouttes at 56px and with only four colors can be really tough. I only casually participated in Inktober '23 by drawing a few monsters up and immediately rendering them in pixel art. This time around, though, instead of trying to match the cute Pokemon aesthetic I focused instead on more complex forms. I wanted to try and push myself and develop my pixel-art skills further. I kept to the same constraints as the previous years.
Each entry represented some kind of boundary-pushing: the first (Skulk) was a simple idea, but a more complicated form. The second (Janumask) was both a fully fleshed-out narrative concept and a complex form to render. Nightmare, the third and last, was simpler in all aspects, but was the most challenging due to color decisions. I wanted black to be the primary color, and up to this point black had mostly been used for borders and elements appearing 'behind' the forms spatially.
I very much enjoy working on these pixel-fakemon, and expect to do another round of them again in October '24.
Three fakemon from 2023: Skulk, Janumask, and Nightmare.
