Sprite Progress #2 - Toxapex

  

 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