>>13507819Mature direction with Pokémon is good, I think that taking ideas and stories to places GameFreak and the anime would never go is good.
Now I'm not an artist or really part of the whole drawing and artstyle thing but as an average person:
There is definitely too much the of the edginess vibe in the artstyle. It's good to differentiate the style from the official stuff but this looks like it's trying to go from one pole to the complete opposite. The world doesn't have to be edgy and full of death and sadness. It just needs to add realism and more of the undesirable parts of life. Death and loss are fine but they shouldn't be the focus which is what the art makes it seem like. It looks like it'll be a world fill with teens lamenting over the loss of their Pokémon and deaths thrown around as a false form of character development and drama.
When I think mature but not quite edgy I think the Getter Robo series (bit of a mecha fan). Look up pictures of the characters from that series, specifically Shin Getter Robo. The characters have very defined styles but they don't have an air of edginess to them.
What strikes out as edgy to me is pretty much all of the kid's face. Absurd or silly hairstyles are assumed to be fine but that little swirl of hair combined with the look in his eyes screams teenage drama. Cockiness is fine but he looks like a prude who will inevitably suffer as a result. If that's what you're going for, more power to you.
Totodile also looks off to me. It's something about the eye that we can see. Pets look like their owners but the totodile almost looks like its face just morphed into your artstyle rather than maintaining how it originally was. The raised arm also looks odd since I imagine a Totodile wouldn't lift its arms to fight considering its stature.
Again I won't even pretend to be knowledgeable about art in any form but I presume this isn't just to impress artists.
