The Art of Ken Sugimori

If you ever collected the Pokémon Trading Card Game cards, odds are good you've seen Ken Sugimori's name before - he illustrated all the cards that looked the coolest. He's the principal character designer for Pocket Monsters, providing nearly all the official artwork for the video games and even a couple of anime characters.

Let's look at his art. Here's one of the first concept paintings he ever did, for the Pocket Monsters Red and Green video games.

Evidently, Lizardon was originally supposed to be a caricature of Jay Leno.

And here's another one from around the same time.

Those are either the biggest starters or the smallest trainers I've ever seen.

After a couple of years, Sugimori's style evolved. For one thing, he stopped using actual watercolors and began coloring his work digitally. Personally, I kinda miss the watercolors, but I can't deny that his more recent stuff has been pretty darn awesome too.

I got nothing more to say, really - these are just really awesome paintings. Check out more of his stuff in this gallery at The Pika Club.