Mega Greninja

In my first posted Pokémon artwork, starring Mudkip, I explored using graphics to create a design from an illustration. I hoped this would give the artwork a more unique identity than painting a background or leaving it blank. Continuing with this idea, I wanted to illustrate and create a design of the newly introduced Mega Evolutions for the upcoming Pokémon Legends: Z-A.
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Mega Greninja
The upside down concept of Greninja's design was really interesting to work around in similar way to how I approached the Victreebel design. I got a couple really good poses, with two that stood out. One was a low angle of Greninja squating and looking up that had really interesting foreshortening. The second was a pose inspired by key art from Spiderman: into the Spiderverse that also played with upside sown perspectives. I really liked both poses and was ready to use the former pose before I had eureka moment of doing a rippling effect with the latter pose. Greninja has a very cool colour palette, and I kept this going by using green shading to blend with the blues and blacks. But to keep things interesting, I used red as a bounce light that really contrasted the cool colours and gave the scene a sense of danger.
After doing a few of these designs already, I wanted to take a different approach to these next ones that involved the starters. My intent was to design them with aspects of book covers, and with Greninja's Japanese inspirations, I added elements that are very common in a lot of old Japanese notebooks. This informed the geometric ripple pattern in the background, but more importantly was the papery label in the corner that features vertical text.