Fakemon Resources

If you need guidance or inspiration when working on ideas for a fakemon or project, the links on this page should help. They cover a wide variety of topics, from art tutorials to fakemon design to useful programs. If you have another helpful resource to suggest, contact me and let me know about it so that I can check it out.

General Pokémon Info

It's much easier to create believable Pokémon, moves and more if you understand the way the existing ones work. These resources are also useful when working on projects that involve the canon Pokémon themselves.

Bulbapedia - The Wikipedia of the Pokémon world. Bulbapedia has information on just about everything Pokémon-related, from game information to animé information to manga information and more. Most Pokémon fans already recognize Bulbapedia as an invaluable resource, and several of its pages in particular, such as the elemental type pages and fanon terminology lists, are especially helpful when researching for fan projects.

veekun - One of the most comprehensive online pokédexes out there, covering all generations of mainstream games and anything that relates to them. Probably most useful for its detailed search and comparison functions. If you don't know whether any Pokémon in the Flying egg group can learn Thunder Punch or whether it's logical to teach a Manectric evolution Focus Blast, this is a great place to start.

Fakemon Design

These links all point to tools that come in handy when creating a fakemon, from choosing type combinations to considering plausible movesets, when you need something a little more specific than a general online pokédex.

Guide to Creating Fakemon - This guide, written by Butterfree of the Cave of Dragonflies, covers literally every aspect of a complete, believable fakemon—from concept to typing to egg moves to base happiness and everything in between. It mentions a lot of things that are often forgotten but are essential if you're making a fangame (especially a ROM hack), but even if you just want to make up a picture, some types and a few level-up moves it goes over a lot of things you may not have thought to consider.

The Ultimate Type Tool and Interactive Type Chart - Two neat little gadgets created by Butterfree, these tools let you examine the relationships between the eighteen Pokémon types and are helpful for things like planning out accurate starter triangles or experimenting with a potential fake's type combination. They also allow the user to create new types and compare them with the existing ones. Handy when trying to make logical new types and well thought-out type combinations.

Art Tutorials

Any artwork for your project can look any way you want or need it to; there's no requirement that states that your concept art must mimic Ken Sugimori's style, nor one that your sprites need to look like they were ripped from an actual game. That said, if you're interested in learning to do things a certain way then you'll want to look at these. You can also see my video (shameless plug, etc.) here on this site.

G-FauxPokémon's Monster Art Tutorial - This tutorial, which is a bit more general than the two below it, is broken into three parts—lineart, flat colors and then shading. The first two parts use a picture of a fan-made Digimon, not a Pokémon, but that's because the process she uses for both is the same. The third part shown here, shading the flat colors, is specifically geared toward fakemon. Created using Photoshop but shouldn't be too difficult to adapt to the art program of your choice as long as it supports layers. Lineart - Flat Colors - Shading

Hallm3's Sugimori-Style Tutorial - Hallm3, a popular Sugimori-style artist, shares his technique here. Again, created with Photoshop in mind but should be easy enough to translate into other software. (This is the tutorial I learned from, for the record.)

Yayster's Sugimori-Style Tutorial - Another Sugi-style tutorial, this one by Yayster. Note that Yayster's tutorial involves creating the lineart itself on the computer where G-Faux and Hallm3 hand-draw their lineart.

PinkGermy's Sugimori-Style Video Tutorial - This speedpaint video demonstrates PinkGermy's Sugimori-style process, using Paint Tool SAI rather than Photoshop. The captions are in French, but the steps they go through to create their example should be pretty easy to follow.

General Spriting Guide - Another of Butterfree's tutorials, this one covering all the basics of spriting from simple recolors to full-on scratch spriting.

Art Programs

If you're in the market for something more sophisticated than Microsoft Paint or other simplistic, default art programs and don't want to shell out inordinate amounts of money for Photoshop, these are for you.

MediBang Paint - A relatively new free and powerful painting program. It runs on Mac and Windows and also has full-featured versions for iOS and Android—in fact, the Android version is what I personally currently use for my artwork.

The GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or just the GIMP, is considered one of the best free alternatives to programs like Photoshop. Loaded with features and runs on just about any operating system; if you have a Linux OS then you may even already have this installed.

Paint.NET - Art editing software for Windows, though it may be possible to run it on Linux-based systems as well with a bit of tweaking. Supports layers and transparency and has a lot of advanced features.

Image Hosting/Places to Display Your Work

Any artwork or other images you create will need to be put online in order for everyone else to see them. Most people already have an account with at least one of these sites (or a similar one), but if you don't then you should go ahead and sign up for one—they're all free and relatively easy to work with.

deviantART - Probably the internet's largest art community, and one that has several thriving sub-communities dedicated to fakemon art (and tutorials like the ones listed above).

Tumblr - "Art Tumblrs", blogs created specifically for showcasing a user's artwork, are a pretty common thing, and you could create a blog specifically for your fakemon if you wanted to. Several people have even gotten creative and started community-created regions, or have found interesting ways to walk visitors through their own region as though they were playing a game.

Photobucket - Photobucket is probably the internet's biggest image storage service and generally works very well. Their storage space and bandwidth are a bit restrictive and they may shut your account down for inactivity if you aren't careful, but overall Photobucket is quite reliable. You can also set up Photobucket galleries, although I don't know that there's any community around them so you'll still have to post the images somewhere more visible on your own.

Miscellaneous

The IdeaDex - A Tumblr blog run by yours truly. Follow it or just browse through it for fakemon inspiration (weird animals, cool plants, fun ideas, etc.) and for occasional fakemon-creating advice. You're welcome to ask a question there yourself as well; check to make sure asks and submissions are allowed first, though, as I may occasionally disable them to give myself a bit of a break.

Rapid-Fire Region Challenge - A thirty-day challenge I created to help jump-start new regions and fakedexes. There's no deadline or specific time to start, and you're free to take as much time as you need or deviate from the listed daily challenges, but seeing what you come up with after following these prompts for thirty days should be fun and give you at least a few interesting results!

The Fakeathon Fakemon Art Challenge - A Tumblr blog run by Pokémon Uranium co-creator Involuntary Twitch/Oripoke (although you can participate on Twitter, DeviantArt and other sites, too). Every June and October the Fakeathon holds a themed thirty-day fakemon design challenge. The challenge is casual—do as many or as few as you want, in whatever art medium you like, etc.—and even if there is no currently active challenge, you can certainly look through the prompt lists for previous challenges for more inspiration!