Hello! It’s 2025! Wowee! Welcome to the new year, and welcome to more blog posts from me rambling about random things I like. Last year I made a big post about playing Pokemon Red, and I’m currently still in the middle of getting through Silver, so in the meantime, I wanted to still talk Pokemon but maybe on something a bit more specific. So: Pokemon designs!

In 2023 I made a zine collecting all the fakemon I had made for my own fakemon region, called Lapeo. This one was themed around prehistory (of course), with a specific design idea that kept me grounded (ha) while designing them. It had to be based on prehistoric creatures, or ideas around that, and regional forms usually would take the Rock type out of the fossil mons.

Well, I recently made a whole page with all of the designs I’ve done so far, including Pokedex entries! There’s also a few new faces, as I’m expanding on the dex again. I’ll post about them soon, so here’s the tag if you want to rummage through my past ramblings about the rest of these guys, and look at some of my old designs.

I wouldn’t call myself a “fakemon artist”, necessarily. I’ve dabbled it in a few times, but I can only do it when I really have a good goal in mind for what I want. Here’s some of the fakemon/Pokemon designs I played with before starting Lapeo:

These were made as a “design a fakemon based on yourself” challenge, so I made Exclaimingo for me and Inkblot for my partner. I tried to colour these like the classic Sugimori watercolour Pokemon art, which is quite hard, but fun!

Now these are redraws of some old fakemon starters I made when I was quite young! So I have been making fakemon for a while, I guess. I actually made an entire region then, but from what I remember, a good chunk of the designs were just, well… repurposed Digimon. But the starters were original, at least partly. The Rootkin and Splish lines are hardly changed from their old designs, but Croal is completely new, since my original starter was pretty much just a Torchic line knock-off. I still love Frignition, mostly for that name. I also changed Leafard to have a pink flower around it, but I only realize now I may have made an… actual pussycat here. Hmmm–

(As a small aside, I do kinda miss when starters became more like beasties in their final evolutions. It feels like the general vibe of starters has shifted since Gen 6, and though I wasn’t always the biggest fan of starters, having it turn into a cool beast was way more satisfying to me than it becoming some weird humanoid thing. Skeledirge in S/V seems like the first time in a while we’ve had a starter that feels like that again, but it’s still not quite the same, though I can’t put my finger on why…)

Although not entirely fakemon, I also played with the trend on tumblr at the time of making mixed breed mons and species variants. I loved this one, simply because it let me play with official designs, and also merging two different Pokemon is always fun. Can you tell I really like bird Pokemon–?

I just really love fakemon. Fan-made designs are only limited by the imagination of the artist, and I always enjoy seeing what people cook up. You have a range of fakemon: from ones that look like they could easily be official Pokemon, to ones that clearly are more in the artist’s style. There’s cool one-offs, there’s entire regions and Pokedexes, some even go so far to make entire fangames.

Making the Lapeo region kinda came to me on a whim; as you can see, I dabbled in fakemon, but I’d never committed to making a full region since childhood. It helps that recent games don’t need a full, 100+ dex–a good 50 or so mons is a decent dex now, and that feels way more manageable. The main idea that really spurred Lapeo into existence was the thought that fossil mons are always stuck being part Rock type because they’re resurrected from fossils–but what if they weren’t? What if their potential was being held back because the resurrection process wasn’t quite getting it right? Also… I love prehistoric things, so making fakemon based on that was just merging my two favourite things together.

When I first started Lapeo, I wanted to try and mimic the official Pokemon art style, but that proved hard for me. These first designs were fun, but I feel like in trying to mimic the style, I was a bit more restricted with my designing.

So I redrew them in a simpler style that felt my own, which also gave me the opportunity to redesign some of them. As you can see, Eurypterra, Arthromotive, Dimwick, Sliktaalik and Nothocean all got complete reworks. I feel like this made them way stronger, and more “mine” than before! I’m quite proud of my work on these fakemon, and it’s been a real blast doing this project!

The biggest design advice that I always take to heart when designing fakemon–or, honestly, any kind of critter or character–is that there can never be a Pokemon that’s “too cool”. Even the coolest Pokemon have to have something about them that makes them a bit silly, or takes off a few “cool points”. Mewtwo has the weird ball hands. Lugia has a big belly. Salamence has little stubby legs. Garchomp has little spikes for hands. To me, the most memorable Pokemon are ones that balance this cool-factor with the dorkiness. It gives them a character, because when something is just simply too cool–where do you go from there?

So I’ve technically had this post kicking around since early last year, sitting in my drafts. I’m not sure why I didn’t get around to posting it, but dammit, I’m doing it now. I’m gonna end this by asking anyone reading this: do you have any favourite fakemon projects? Please tell me about them, because I always love checking them out!

Cheers!