Joey & Charmander Version 2

Last week, I was talking about a series of pictures I drew for a Pokemon Blue playthrough that I want to do soon.  In case you missed it, here's an image of me (as the Riolu in the red coat) alongside my Charmander in all three stages of its evolution: Charmander, Charmeleon, and Charizard (front to back).

I made these images back in June last year, but I was not satisfied with how some of these drawings came out.  So a couple of months ago, I decided to redraw some of these pictures and rework the image overall.  How did that work out?

So, I kept the Riolu and Charizard drawings from the first version because I thought those were the ones that actually looked awesome already.  The drawings I was worried about were Charizard's first two stages: Charmander and Charmeleon.  The poses on those ones seemed off to me somehow, so I decided to draw them again.  I kept the same coloring decision for those two that I made last time (making Charmander the most pink one), but I wanted to pose them in something a bit more... stable, I guess?  In fact, I tried to set those two in similar stances to their sprites from the original Red and Blue games.  I was, however, satisfied with Charizard's stance, however, so I thought keeping him that way was fine.

You may have also noticed that I built a new background for these images.  This change was a nod to Pokemon's unusual original release history.  The short version is that in Japan, the first two Pokemon games were Red and Green, not Red and Blue like the rest of the world received.  The Pokemon found in the international Blue version are the same ones found in Japan's Green.  There was a separate Blue version in Japan as well, but I will talk about that when I record, and I will refer to the game I play as Green in recording.  To reflect that (and to make the red and orange characters pop out), I decided to make a new green background for these pages.  I did not want to make it a grass green or a chartreuse, though; I still wanted more of a teal color to reflect how you could call this game "Pokemon Blue" or "Pokemon Green" and probably be right.

Hmm... maybe it would have been less trouble to just play this on the Red version.  Ha ha ha...

So, folks, I would like to hear some thoughts on this week's images and last week's.  Which version did you like better?  Old or new?  Blue or green?

Pokemon is a tradmark of Nintendo, GAME FREAK, and the Pokemon Company.  Though I drew these pictures, I claim no ownership over the characters contained in them.