Welcome to our interview with Joshua Dunlop, a true artist known for his ultra-realistic Pokemon drawings.
For those among us who do not know you by name, will surely know your work, so tell us a little about yourself and where we may know you from?
Well, I’m Josh Dunlop, I’m a freelance Concept Artist living in London. I specialize in creature and character design and I’m most well-known for my ‘Pokemon Zoology’ series where I take Pokemon and make them look photorealistic using 3D programs and Photoshop.
Pokemon Zoology kind of happened by accident. About two years ago I was learning how to sculpt in 3D and I wanted a little project to test out my new skills on. Pokemon Go was huge at the time and I thought that would be a fun challenege, to turn the first 3 strater Pokemon into realistic creatures.
I was really happy with the results and a friend of mine told me to put them on Imgur, so I thought there was no harm in it. The next morning he calls me saying I had around 400k views and it was going viral. After that, it spread across the internet like wildfire and I was getting asked to do loads of interviews and my work was being shown on some of my favorite websites. The overwhelming message was ‘DO MORE!’ … so I did, and Pokemon Zoology was born 🙂 I’ve been doing it ever since and my fanbase grows every day. On instagram, I started with 8 followers, and now I have over 150k fans, it’s pretty incredible! The plan is to finish the first 151, I currently have plans to do a Kickstarter to create a fan site that can act as a hub for all my work, and then when I hit 151, I’ll create an art book.
Where can our readers find and follow you?
You can follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook . I also have an Artstation account where you can see more HD versions of my work!
I personally love your work and just look in awe with how realistic they are, how long do you generally take for a single Pokemon?
Thank you! Each image varies due to complexity etc, but on average it takes about 3-4 days to complete an image.
Could you shed some light on the thought process behind creating one of your incredible artworks? Do you plan everything out or does it just come to you?
Generally, there’s a lot of planning involved.
- I’ll start by building up mood boards (collages) of reference material, nature has such weird and wonderful things to pull from.
- I’ll then start sketching ideas out, playing with the design until I’m happy.
- I’ll start to think about how I want the image laid out, and play with some compositional sketches
- The next stop is Zbrush, a powerful 3D sculpting program. I’ll flesh out the creature using ZSpheres, which allow me to create a base to work from.
- I’ll then begin to shape the creature until I’m happy. I’m always thinking about muscle shape and how the skin hangs on the body etc.
- Next, I go into detail. This is usually a combination of freehand tools and alphas. Alphas are essentially texture photos I can use to create detail textures like scales on the surface of the model.
- I then paint the model in Zbrush. I’ll use a combination of photo textures and hand painting.
- Next, I move the model into Keyshot, a very easy to use real-time rendering software. Here I play with material and lighting.
- I’ll render the whole thing out into a variety of passes, such as shadow, AO, highlights, etc and bring those into Photoshop.
- In Photoshop I use a combination of Matte painting (using photos) and digital painting to build the image until I’m happy 🙂
I have a huge amount of artist friends I look up too, some of them include Jort van Welbergen, Alex Heath, Jama Jurabaev, Jorry Rossman and literally the list goes on and on! But the first artist to ever inspire me was James Gurney, the author, and illustrator of my favorite books, Dinotopia. Even though they were oil paintings, the realism astounded me, his understanding of light and color is second to none.
As your love for Pokemon is very clear, what is your favorite Pokemon game and why?
Haha is it that obvious? I’m a real sucker for the originals, so I really enjoyed playing Leaf Green and Fire Red, the nostalgia was overwhelming haha. I’m really interested in what they come up with next, some of the mechanics they are introducing in Lets Go Pikachu could be really interesting, especially when implemented in the next-gen games. I’ll also have a small place in my heart for Pokemon Snap, one of the most underrated Pokemon games, but I loved it all the same. In a weird way, you could say it help inspire my series.
Aside from Pokemon, do you play any other games and which game is in your favorite console right now?
Being Freelance, you’d think I’d have nothing but free time to play games all the time, but sadly no, I work a lot! haha, but when I do get some free time, I love to unwind with a bit of Witcher 3, God of War, The Last of Us and Jurassic World Evolution on my PS4 Pro. Generally, I love a game with a rich story over the FPS, as a creative, I really appreciate all the tiny details people put into the games, it’s very inspiring! My favorite has to be Witcher 3 at the moment, I know its old but I only recently got my PS4 so I have a lot of catching up to do ?
And last but not least, according to you, what was the gaming news of the past year? What event was most noteworthy?
That’s a really tough question. There are so many amazing things coming out all the time in the gaming industry, especially this year. The one I was most excited about for sure was seeing the in-game footage from ‘The Last of Us 2’, just breathtaking quality and design, the guys at Naughty Dog are just incredible!
We would like to thank Joshua for his kind assistance in providing the pictures for our interview and we hope you will all follow him on all the social media he is currently represented!
