Bagon used Rock Tomb!

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"Skitty's speed fell!"

This is an illustration I did for Game-Art-HQ's Pokémon Generation 3 collaboration - and boy is it busy already with people sweeping in for spots!  Both of their previous projects were great fun to be a part of and so fun to see everyone's interpretations of various moves, so I felt very happy to go in again and see what I can send in for those first seen in the Hoenn region!  If you're interested, there's a journal right here:
Our POKEMON Generation III Tribute (161/270)
Update 13.05.2018
Almost 9 weeks and over 150 of the 270 possible slots are taken already with almost 140 Pokemon illustrations already drawn!
This made it by far the fastest growing one of our Pokemon Tributes since we started in March 2016.
Its great to see that more than the half of the artists that participated in our Gen I & II Projects before were returning already in the first weeks while we also got new artists on board that saw our journal here being mentioned in your descriptions. I also updated this journal to make it easier now to see which Pokemon did not get any claims yet
Beside the work here on dA, I was also creating the main gallery for this tribute on Game-Art-HQ.com already and we are going to fill the 130 (empty) individual galleries that are almost completely done already with content starting in the first February week!
Thanks a lot everyone for participating in this big series of Pokemon tribute, please continue to share the word about

Usually I expect the dragon types to get snapped up really quick based on typing alone, but by the time that I got the word go for a fifth contribution, Bagon was yet to have gotten an illustration for some reason.  Yes, I know, its fully evolved form Salamence is a beast to use and had been made even better with its mega evolution for Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, but no one should rule out Bagon - it's even a strong performing beast in Little Cup conditions thanks to its high attack stat, allowing it to benefit with Dragon Dance and a good selection of physical moves.  Problem is, Dragon type moves were classified as Special in the original Game Boy Advance games, so it would've required some careful adaptation to its stats to even give it more of an edge in the competitive field.

It's still a cute little fellow to draw, so I felt it would be cool to match it up with the first Gym Leader reward TM in the game - Rock Tomb, a rock-type move that does damage and also has a secondary effect of slowing down the target Pokémon.  It's a very situational move, but Roxanne would want you to feel proud to use it especially in early-game, where instead of grinding like crazy to overcome your opponents, a strategic placement of one or two of these could help you overcome some fast and brutal creatures really quickly.  Also, Bagon's main ability is Rock Head so it makes sense to align it with a similar sounding move!

The composition I had in mind was to send in a load of rocks - one of those environmental hazards that I do have a tendency to draw a lot in these projects for some reason - to pin down an opposing Skitty in battle, seeing it as the move already pulled off rather than it jumping in the air and sending lots of really fast rocks alongside it.  At 61cm tall and with those kind of proportions, it only makes sense to draw something both cute and mischievous looking in a setting to match it.  The way the pose turned out did however made me approach lighting from the opposite side of the picture as well, so I had to think a lot more carefully about how its body and the rocks were shaded, but otherwise, it turned out good I think x)

You can see the sketch version as yesterday's entry in my 365 sketch challenge for 2018, as always.

Check out my other contributions to the tribute right here:



Pokémon is a franchise owned by the nice guys at Nintendo.  I drew this!