Croakind Fanart

Here's 's fakemon, Croakind. It's the first evolution in the evolutionary chain and the original is right here: fav.me/d6vcwa9.

This might be a longer commentary than usual, but it was a good opportunity to discuss design a little bit. Hopefully this will help you, (who has a pretty well built up gallery btw), and anyone else who designs fakemon (or any sort of creature or character really).

Croakind and it's line (Croakiss and Croaking) have a clear theme of "kissed toad prince" thing going on. It uses an interesting puffy cheek shape apparent on certain frog species. That's great. What I did though was incorporate that in a more natural way into the design by mixing both the cheeks and regal shoulder sleeve like look of that balloon shape into a single thing that even connects with the head, chin, and shoulders as well. The concept comes across the same, but a little more cleverly used.

The kiss marks themselves are also a very overt thing on the design. Almost like it's wearing kiss stickers. It's always better to try and work that directly into the creature's design, even in very subtle ways. The forehead still has a kiss mark on it, but it's much more a part of the frog itself. I then carried that kiss "shape" to other parts. The chest buttons became kiss shaped, the knee separations, and even something as subtle as the dividing line on one side of the arms (the underside is shown on the other arm) has the upper lip line. Now that's subtle!

Next, Croakind had a total of 7 colors in the design's palette, including the rose in it's mouth. I simplified that to only 4. Going to 3 would be too difficult for a design with this level of complexity, or I would've.

Lastly, I may differ on this opinion a bit. Take it as you will. I don't believe in giving props to a pokemon's design (like clothes or weapons.... gasp... even bones or helmets!).... when at all possible. It's almost always better to find a way to put that into the design itself. It's totally fine for this thing to carry a flower, but just not as part of it's design. If I'd thought it was important to the overall theme, I might have included the rose buds in the corner of its mouth or something, but I think the design had enough character and theme going on with the frog prince kiss thing to not have to do that. Simpler was better. You'll also notice the crown was just made a part of the frog's head. There's really no reason it needs to "wear" a crown when it can be made a part of the design as well. And doing so removed a full color from the color palette (the little kissies on the tops of the crown became overkill and no longer were necessary).

I hope everyone benefits from my commentary here in some way or another. Keep creating!