I've actually been sitting on this image for a long time, I think since 2018 or 2019 actually. I was hoping to post it earlier since I thought Id get this Venusaur picture I was doing done to have the entire trio finished but I got kinda lazy with doing that picture. I think the problem is with the Venusaur I made the resolution WAY too big and due to how I do art bigger resolutions take longer to finish. I need to go back and scale the image down so i can actually do a reasonable amount of texturing it honestly. I was considering coming back to this image and re-tuning it since I've gotten better at this sorta thing since then, I kinda don't like how the line art sections off so many things as hard as it does for example (with the arms being SO ball like, even more so than usual for Blastoise, really bothers me) but I feel I should keep it in its original finished state, kinda don't wanna do a sorta revisionist thing to it since it's a bit of a look at what I could do back then. I feel a lot of its problems come from more the sheer amount of black I use on it honestly, a lot of the black spaces could have used a transition for example and they kinda stand out re-looking at it. I also feel like I could have done a better job on clean up, there's a fair few stray pixels and some globby stuff going on with things like the line art and some parts of the shading among other things. I think the texture shadowing still mostly holds up but I really hate how it looks now on the white areas. This piece was also when I was getting REALLY experimental with perspective. I had the idea each starter would be from a different short: Charizard was a mostly neutral level shot, Blastoise would be a super down looking shot, and Venusaur would be from an ant's eye level and sorta has the most going on perspective wise i feel. The eyes on this picture still bother me a tad, couldn't get more gradient shading to look nice but I feel how they look now with the shading's a bit too artificial and it really really bothers me the tear duct is white, but when ever I changed its color it looked just as if not weirder for some reason. i guess since pink isn't really anywhere else on the picture even though its accurate to how tear ducts look more so than white? One thing I never really noticed til I was using references from things like Pokemon Origins is how defined Blastoise's nose is. I made Blastoise super bumpy since that's sorta how I always imagined him and since turtles never really have "smooth" skin. I feel it contrasts Charizard well with his smooth skin and I plan on Venusaur having really warty bumpy skin since that's a toad an all, so its a nice middle ground. Again sorry for never really updating, hopefully Ill start uploading more!