Spooky Halloween Challenge

This months OCA Visual Communications Discord server art challenge was Halloween themed. The brief was very open ended and the content submitted just had to be somewhat related to the Halloween season.

I knew almost immediately that I wanted to illustrate some Pokémon. There are a lot of ghost-type Pokémon which I thought would fit the theme perfectly! I also decided to do this challenge with watercolours, rather than digitally as I usually do. I’ve been exploring watercolour more and more and getting comfortable enough with it to complete finished illustrations!

I picked the Pokémon Misdreavus (top), Duskull (left), Shuppet (right), Drifloon (centre), and Sableye (in front). I wanted to illustrate them in a graveyard setting and tried sketching out some ideas for how this could look. Originally I decided to illustrate this piece in landscape but realised when sketching that the piece would look much better if done in portrait. The Pokémon were quite small in the landscape version, and I really wanted them to stand out.

I reduced the idea of a graveyard scene down to just one single gravestone and some pumpkins. I wanted to focus on illustrating the Pokémon and showing a ‘spooky’ vibe. I sketched out the final illustration and scanned it so that I had a copy just in case something went wrong. I then added masking fluid to the Pokémon areas and began painting the sky. Unfortunately, when removing the masking fluid some of the paper got torn off, which is quite a common issue with masking fluid. Thankfully it wasn’t too much and I was able to fix it.

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I then painted the Pokémon, added some shading, and finally added line art and highlights with a white gel pen. I scanned in the piece and altered the colours slightly to help them pop a little more, and the illustration was complete! I am so so happy with this, it was so much fun to illustrate and has sparked creative energy in me that I’m looking forward to taking on to future projects.

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