Here's my attempt at the iconic night scene of the Fogbound Lake geyser from the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorer games.
This scene has been drawn so many times by so many artists (and rightfully so!), that I felt if I was going to do it, I'd have to bring something new to the table. I wanted to draw it in my own different interpretation, while staying as close as I could to its source.
I feel like I've accomplished this by drawing how the water flows back down the geyser. I took inspiration from studying photos of real geysers, but they didn't look very interesting for this piece, they're just columns of water spray, after all. So, I scaled down to water fountains, where the water droplets made the photos more interesting to look at. They looked like glass marbles rolling down a shapeless column of polished crystal.
While I didn't go with the translucent crystal look for the geyser, I did implement the droplets idea.
And then there was the lighting. You have the Volbeat and Illumise floating around with their colored lights sprinkled around the geyser, but this intense light source of pinks and purples coming from underneath the geyser, I felt like this should've been the predominant lighting for the whole scene in the games. In the orignal scene, the geyser's columns of water don't seem to take in this light source into them, so in this illustration I allowed some purple to gradually make its way up the columns.
But I also had these pinks and purples touch every single aspect of this piece. From the clouds in the sky, to the Pokemon life around the geyser, down to the lake water and all the rock formations and vegetation, this light, whatever its source may be, has a larger than life energy to it, and so it should be reflected on the world around it. The world that it impacts.
Overall, this was an amazing piece to work on, so much so that I've made sure to save multiple back-ups of it. I've lost multiple art pieces to computer crashes and death, and accidental deletes on my part. But not this one. I should also thank deltathelittleartist who commissioned me to work on a slightly different version of this piece.
Thanks for reading this blog post! I hope you enjoyed it!
