Another negative space/white pen black canvas experiment that I had way too much fun with. If there is truly a horror game that can be described as “spoopy”, it’s Zoonomaly - sure, the monsters are uncanny with their weirdly-human faces on distorted animal bodies, but they’re also… kind of goofy-looking that way? I find it oddly endearing overall, so it quickly captured my heart. And I decided to traumatize the Pokémon fanbase again.

Every mutated(?) Pokemon here is based on a monster from Zoonomaly or an animal that I think would work really well as another monster in Zoonomaly.

• Meowth - Based on the “Smile Cat”, which is also an unofficial mascot of the animator who developed the game.
• Arbok - Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a snake enemy? It’d move in a different way from the others due to being able to climb up walls, meaning a puzzle with a snake would have different rules from the rest! I think I’d put it in the big glassed-in platform puzzle - that one I felt needed a little more reason to exist.
• Jigglypuff - Based on the giant rabbit. @BrenBot, our resident chatbot, gave me that idea while I was goofing off in chat one day.
• Vaporeon - Based on the fish monsters in the lake and the aquarium. Out of all the aquatic Pokémon, I picked Vaporeon in particular because I felt like being sadistic - you try “human-Pokémon breeding” with this and you might escape with your life. >:)
• Rillaboom - Based on the monkeys. There are two enclosures with monkeys in the game, so they feel a little redundant with each other. But what if one of those had a bigger “boss monkey” or ape that you had to deal with?
• Bulbasaur - Based on one type of non-violent creatures in the game: these big quadrupedal… things. They make cow noises and are supposedly cows? But like… their faces and feet look like a weird missing link between a frog and a human. It’s freaky and strange, but I mean, they’re smiling at you?
• At one point I also wanted to try making Mamoswine as the formidable elephant monster, but it didn’t end up working. I also thought of adding something in to correspond with the zookeeper enemies, but I don’t think I could’ve reconciled the anime art style of Pokémon humans with… this.

I tried a few different methods to replicate the odd black texturing effect that all of the monsters have, and some worked better than others. I also tried shading with negative space and made copious use of the layer mask tool, to be able to remove some parts of the white layers for details.

So overall, this was fun and a cool learning experience! I think the Arbok and Bulbasaur were my best work, but which horrifying abominations are your favorites?

Serious art will hopefully resume soon, I’ve been pretty busy and stressed IRL so even sketches like these are going to take longer.

-Cass (Thetageist)