Sneak Peek #2

 

 A bit of a longer post for today, so get ready to spend an extra minute or two reading. I didn't get much done today, though I suppose it's about time I start showing off the Pokemon's backsprites. In this case, let's take a look at Kecleon's.

 

 I'm quite proud of my work on Kecleon, and here you can see both regular and Purple Kecleon's regular and shiny variations. The Purple Kecleon is from the Mystery Dungeon games and anime for those who don't know. It is just a palette swap of the original, but that's because I don't believe putting in the effort to make an entirely new sprite for a recolored version of it is worth my time, at least not at the moment. It doesn't appear in any mainline game and doesn't have a canonical shiny, so I came up with my own. 

 

 I did give the two a small distinction beyond their color schemes, and that's with the animation. It's nothing crazy, but the regular one fades as it camouflages from the top down, and the purple one from the bottom up.

 

 Anyway, let's get looking at what I've got planned to do next. A month and a half ago, I teased what Pokemon I'd be making sprites for next. I haven't got a ton done since then, and that's mainly due to one thing. This calendar year has perhaps been my most productive so far, with 116 distinct Pokemon/forms being completed and uploaded to my Dropbox. A couple of times throughout all of that, I got severely burnt out. Whenever that happens, I tend to take weeks if not months off from anything relating to spritework. I'm only just coming back from my most recent bout of burnout, so I'm not at full throttle yet.

 

 

 If you follow me on my socials (I don't know where you'd have found this blog otherwise), you'll know I've done a few of these already, including some of their evolutionary lines. So far, Golett, Golurk, Mega Golurk, Mareanie, Toxapex, Togepi, Togetic, Goomy, both Sliggoos, and Kecleon have been completed. I fully intend on finishing the rest, but I thought it'd be fun if I added one extra set of sprites to make. Introducing the Substitute!

 

 This is one of those placeholders that I put extra care into, pose and all. Not to toot my own horn, but I really like what I've got here, and think the final sprite is gonna look fantastic. Once I finish it, I plan on tackling the Tapus next. 

 I've been putting a lot of effort into completing Gen 7, and the four guardian deities of Alola were ones I've been putting off for a long time because I didn't think I'd do them justice. That has changed as I've grown more confident in my skill, so please look forward to those when I get to them. That being said, I may take a bit longer completing them since they're fairly detailed designs that will be harder to translate into Gen 2's style.

 

Cya next time ~

Sage

 

 

Sprite Progress #3

 After subjecting myself to some rage-inducing games of Deadlock (I am a filthy Dynamo main), I decided I ought to finally tackle making a sprite for Kecleon. This one was quite fun to sprite, partially because the little fella has an excellent design, but mainly because I had put extra care into the placeholder's pose.

 The final sprite didn't end up with the an exact 1:1 pose, after all I did lift its leg up, but you can see how everything else is pretty much the same. The proportions are also a bit different, mainly in regards to the head. Speaking of the head, one quirk with Gen 2's style: many Pokemon have their heads slightly larger than their official designs. I assume this was to allow more detail and expressiveness to be shown on their faces, and I usually follow that with my own sprites. I also have a tendency to make my sprites a smidge pudgier than they're supposed to be, but that's just a personal preference.

 With this one's shiny I chose to keep the blue stripe on its belly, but I changed the green. Kecleon's shiny normally has a green much closer to the regular version. I went for a much more different green just because I felt it would contrast with the blue better.

 I've still not animated it or made a backsprite for it yet, but I'll take care of that soon. I did, however, completely finish Toxapex, though I won't be uploading it to my Dropbox until I have a big enough group of sprites to test in PokeCrystal all at once.

Cya next time ~

Sage

Sprite Progress #2

  

 I managed to pretty much finish Toxapex's front sprite. No animation or backsprite yet, but that can come later. In the meantime, you can see a few steps of my process making this sprite.

 

 As per usual, I start off with a placeholder sprite. Sometimes I make these months ahead of time, purely to give myself an idea of the canvas size to use and what the Pokemon's proportions may look like. In many cases the placeholder's pose is used at least as a reference for the final sprite, but sometimes I go with a completely different pose. In Toxapex's case I couldn't get too crazy with it, so the placeholder did the trick.

 

 Depending on how much detail I gave the placeholder, I might just trace over it with clean line art. This one was a bit messy, so I only used it to get a rough placement on everything. Little by little I work out the entire main body, fix the proportions, and once I'm satisfied I color it in. I usually take a long while choosing the final colors, but once I do I start shading and highlighting the sprite. This also usually takes longer than I'd like to admit, but eventually I get there.

 When it comes to the shiny variation, most of the time I try to go for something close to their canonical mainline shiny versions. For some Pokemon this isn't possible, other times it looks really bad due to the 4 color limitation of Gen 2's battle sprites, and sometimes I just change it entirely to colors of my own choosing. Toxapex falls into that second category, since the regular's lighter color becomes the darker color in the canonical shiny. This makes the shading and highlights look completely wrong, so I have to make it different for the sake of visual cohesion. I did choose to keep a similar color for the outside of its arms, but the purple stayed a similar dark purple instead of a lighter pink. I'm quite satisfied with how this sprite ended up, shiny and all. Still gotta animate it and make a backsprite though!

 

Cya next time ~

Sage

 

 

Sprite Progress #1

 Don't expect this every day, but I've gone and finished Hisuian Sliggoo! 

 I had a bit of trouble with its shell and went through a few iterations before deciding on the final version. It mostly boiled down to making it a distinct color from the gooey body and making it seem as smooth as a metal shell would.

 You might notice the Hisuian Sliggoo is actually edited off the original one, or at least part of it. This is something I usually do for regional variants or other forms that maintain large similarities with their original forms.

 Some are much harder to notice such as with my Ursalunas, but if you pay close attention you'll see the head shape is nearly identical. Smaller portions of Bloodmoon's body are also edited from the original, while also containing completely new portions.

 Doing this helps cut down on the time it takes to make these sprites, and if I do it well enough I can avoid it being distracting. I could make entirely 100% new sprites for some of these, but doing it like this is more convenient and helps me make both sprites more visually consistent with each other.

 I didn't have a ton to share today, and most posts are likely to be close to this in terms of simplicity, so there's a fair warning in you end up reading anything here at all.

 

Cya next time ~

Sage 

Sneek Peek #1

 

 I should probably post something actually related to my sprites so... here's a quick look at what I'm working on right now.

 

 I quite like the Goomy line! Though seeing as I'm doing Toxapex after the Sliggoos instead of the Goodras does put into perspective how unfocused my process is. Well, at least I redid my Goomy recently.

 

 Pretty neat, eh? The old Goomy dates back to December of 2024, though the version on the left is a slightly downsized version of it I put on my Dropbox just a month later. You can tell even that wasn't enough for me since the new one is still smaller than that. I don't think the old one is bad per se, but generation 2 sprites really pop out more when they have contrasting colors. It's not possible with every Pokemon's design, but with a little creativity white serves as a great substitute for lighter colors in many cases. 

 

 

 The new Goomy and Sliggoo do mean I'll have to redo my regular Goodra to match whenever I get to it, which I think will suffer the most from losing out on its two purples, but I'm sure I can make do. At least I didn't waste any time animating that one.

 

 Anyway, that's plenty for today. If anybody is actually reading this, I hope you've enjoyed this little glimpse into my super unorganized process. By the way, Blogger has a comment feature so if you've got any questions about... well, anything really, feel free to ask away. I'll be more than glad to answer to the best of my ability.

 

Cya next time ~

Sage

Starting Something New

 

Howdy hey, it's ya boy, Sage. Not my actual name of course, but I've been using it online since at least 2015 so it may as well be at this point. Anyway, welcome to my blog! 

This is the beginning of what I'd like to think of as a glimpse into my fucked-up mind. Why is it fucked up, might you ask? Simple, I really like pixel art; mainly that which is in the style of Pokemon's second generation. I'm not even sure why I like it so much, Gold, Silver, and Crystal aren't even my favorite games in the franchise. Maybe it's the simplicity of the style? Well, maybe I'll figure that out later. The point is, I'm gonna be posting my journey making the sort of sprites I'm known for at this point, and hopefully more as I go.

You've probably noticed already, but my style of writing is a bit wordy and disjointed. If you don't like that, I do apologize, but that's probably how every post here is gonna be. I could and probably should write a little more professionally, but I also want to consider this a diary of sorts. Wait no, Greg Heffley wouldn't approve of that. Journal it is. Anyway, I plan of sharing more personal thoughts later down the line, stuff I wouldn't normally share on Twitter or Bluesky in fear of getting bullied by the local alt-right blue checkmark nutjobs. I've noticed there's a tag system I'll be using so if this sort of thing isn't your style, you'll be able to filter it out.

 

Why in hell did I decide to start a blog in the year 2026? Well, back when I was first browsing the internet, long before I should've been allowed on it, I would frequent random blogs and forums and just read whatever was there to be read. I kind of miss that feeling, and obviously I know writing my own blog is inherently different to reading them, but eh, whatever. It's a good excuse to be more diligent with documenting my progress as an artist, and maybe a way to vent every once in a while.

I don't expect to get much of an audience here, but naturally I'll link this on my socials and see if I can get at least a few readers. I don't know how frequently I'll post, or how long said posts will be. Hell, I haven't even bothered learning how to use Blogger properly yet. I'm pretty much winging it. But hey, maybe it'll be fun for everyone involved.

 

Cya next time ~

Sage