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Poliwhirl's Mouth

posted by graham on May 3, 2025

I spent some time this morning thinking about Pokémon. Specifically, I considered how the poliwag, poliwhirl, poliwrath evolution line mimics poliwogs, frogs, and frog-themed wrestlers. While considering this, I noticed that poliwag’s mouth is separate from the hypnotic spiral on its front:

the default photo of poliwag, the tadpole pokemon showing its mouth above the spiral

This led me to consider how poliwhirl’s mouth must work. I came up with the following two options, which I illustrated by hand on my phone:

normal poliwhirl at the top, an arrow down to the left of poliwhirl illustrated in all blue with a thin black mouth line, and an arrow down to the right of poliwhirl illustrated to open a mouth that sort of peels away the spiral to open

I think the one on the right is technically more frog-like, while the left just looks like a blue Dot Gobbler.

tags: #pokemon #art #digital art

Phinks, the Racecar Driver

posted by graham on November 26, 2024

A mustachioed Italian-looking man, wearing a stereotypical Egyptian Pharaoh headdress and a green tracksuit with red stripes, talks on the phone apprehensively

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Phinks, member number 5 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: [...] Next to them is a fellow in a racing [unintelligible] outfit.

Sylvi: [laughs]

Jack: Green racing driver’s outfit, uh, uh, white shoulders on his jacket, red stripes, green sort of track jacket, almost. Now, next to this person, this is interesting. This is a character I have seen before. I, I don’t know anything about —

Jack: We have Phinks! With a P-H. P-H-I-N-K-S.

Keith: Yep. [Sylvia laughs]

Jack: Who is a grumpy racing driver. He’s a man in a sort of racing driver.

Sylvia: Oh, okay. That’s an interesting— I didn’t get racing driver from him. I always got, uh, Chris Moltisanti.

Keith: But I get it from the jacket though. Sorry, you get who?

Dre: Yeah, I totally get it.

Sylvia: Chris Moltisanti from The Sopranos?

Keith: Oh, it is.

Jack: Oh, yeah. [Dre laughs]

Sylvia: The, like, tracksuit vibe?

Jack: Yeah, totally. It’s absolutely that tracksuit vibe. I also saw it as, like, a racing jacket or, like, racing colors.

Keith: Yeah. Yeah.

Sylvia: Yeah, no, absolutely.…

tags: #art #digital art #hxh #media club plus #friends at the table

A Year of HxH Characters

posted by graham on October 1, 2024

A short boy in checkered vans and a tall-collared jacket with a skull on it holds his hand out as if to manipulate a finger on the other hand into a sharp claw

A hunched over Frankenstein monster wearing a suit and pointing one finger out in a finger gun

Shizuku, a short woman with glasses, a turtle neck, and a gold cross necklace, looking off into the sky. And Blinky, her Nen vacuum, who has eyes and teeth and a tongue

Owl, a gray-skinned man with a gargoyle head wearing sunglasses, who has a toothpick in his fanged mouth and a tan kerchief in his pocket

Worm, a mostly nude man with a 💩 head bursting out of the ground as rocks and dirt fly skyward

Rabid Dog, a man with spikey hair and sharp teeth running open-handedly towards the camera

Leech, a Junji-Ito-style portrait that's zoomed in on the face and has lots of unsettling details, including a long and thick tongue that looks kind of like a slug

Porcupine, a short bald old man with a giant mono-brow looking up at the camera and doing the 🥺👉👈 expression

Very simple sketches of each of the other named shadow beasts, along with their names below each one

A barbarian stepping with a boot on a canyon rock while catching a bazooka shell in one hand and a bullet in his teeth

A man in a rocket-boosted wheelchair electrocutes Killua via long metallic snake wires

A guy wearing a mask slamming his hand down in the air while a giant magical hand slams the ground in front of him

A muscly guy with shoulder-length straight hair, a button-down, and a bow and arrow

A man with a sort of pompadour haircut and a mustache and beard but no goatee crosses his arms and holds an ink brush in one hand. He wears no shirt, only a vest

A woman with purple hair billowing out against gravity, and in a matching purple cocktail dress bends over and blows a kiss at the camera

A short, androgynous looking woman with pointed buck teeth rolls up their sleeve while grass green musical lines swirl around her

A shiny purple plastic box with a red lid, opened to reveal three sections, each containing one of the items listed in the quotes below

An overhead shot of an old woman sitting at a table, holding a tea mug

A three panel comic: 1. Ging Freecs wearing his animal coat and scowling while holding his hand out, 2. A zoomed-out view showing Ging riding atop the head of an enormous melting frog, 3. A further zoomed-out view of that melting frog riding an unfathomably large green dragon, all soaring above clouds over the open ocean

An over-the-shoulder forced-perspective view of a guy sitting on a tree branch, curled up in a ball from recoil, with his hands out producing a hadouken of smoke that goes down to an acorn bullet zooming towards Kurapika on the forest floor

A bored-looking lady resting her head on her hand on the front counter, while raising her other hand into the air with her pointer finger out, summoning a magical ghostly gremlin. She has lots of tattoos, including a forehead one that says HUNT

A girl with dark purple hair hunches over with arms akimbo. She wears black and pink clothes that are both pink witch and a little bit spooky

A woman in dark red scrubs patterned like a ninja and wearing a stethoscope holds her hand out towards the camera with an even darker red glow of nen around it

Kastro and his ghostly imperfect doppelganger pose back-to-back as they each prepare to deliver tiger bite fist attacks

A one-legged cloaked man holding a cane, with a tube coming out of the face-hole of the cloak, raises his hand as if letting three purple spectral beyblades be ripped towards the camera. He is flanked by two blueish ghostly silhouettes of the other two of The Chosen 3 in a forced 3-point perspective

A tall, lanky man with messy hair wearing an untucked button-down stands looking slightly worried, but otherwise non-threateningly

A little guy with tightly cropped brown hair in a dark gray gi with no belt, holding his hands in fists at his sides and slightly bowing as he says Osu

The guy pointing at himself meme but it looks like nervous Killua with extra eye make-up and text at the bottom that reads Friends?

A woman in an old formal purple dress, a bulky visor, and a big floppy hat stands fanning herself

An old, hunched-over man wearing a cloak and a stole over it that says one kill per day

A fancy looking man with Handsome Squidward's face sits in a blue chair next to a dog with human arms laying curled up on a throw rug

A young black woman wearing a red hooded cape standing in a defensive pose with her cane in some sand

An anime woman in bright clothing holding a small microphone and speaker gestures behind her to a mountain in the background

An old, absolutely ripped man holding his lower back with one hand and leaning on the other arm bent over an industrial-sized trashcan on wheels

A butler wearing a vest and tie about to flip a coin, with a menacing grin on his face

Mike, a dog with arms that is the size of a house, squeezes a human like a stress toy with purplish haze clouding everything

An illustration of a person kneeling as he digs furiously at the ground at dusk

A low angle illustration of a buff man in a robe walking towards the camera with his left hand dragging through the gray brick wall as he moves

An illustration of a cloaked figure next to a woman with thigh high boots, a skirt, and a crop top, with big poofy bright magenta hair in two ponytails

An illustration of a muscular anime guy who is on fire from clenching his muscles so hard

An illustration of a gangly guy with long dark hair holding two candles of different sizes

A forced perspective illustration of a blue man punching the ground really hard so that it cracks

An old woman holding a cane who is in a green dress with comically large black eyebrows

An illustration of a lady with sunglasses, a vest, and a sniper on her back

An over the shoulder illustration of a man with a grey moustache and no mouth while running mid-stride

A bald old man with a white beard wearing a blue and white robe and geta sandals, holding a squash ball in his right hand

A drawing of Menchi holding 9 knives on the left and a much taller Buhara holding a fork and wearing an apron on the right

An illustration of a boy dressed in all green holding a fishing rod above his head and leaping toward the left. His outermost layer is a green camo-textured robe

An illustration of a guy in red and blue spinning nunchucks in one hand while slightly crouching and guarding his chest with the other hand.

Guy holding what looks like a bat attached to a beehive over his shoulder

A drawing of a man smiling and pointing to a ninja mask that he's holding up next to his face

An illustration of a buff, bald, shirtless male 90s action-figure with pins sticking of it

A lad holding a skateboard while wearing a white t-shirt. Their white hair points up like a flame, and they drink a fowl-looking drink contentedly

A Martin-Prince-looking kid sitting in front of a laptop like Schroder from Charlie Brown

A drawing of a Jojo-looking person with a pale white face, pink hair, and a pale lime green doublet with playing card symbols on it

A guy in a white button down and black pants sheepishly rocking on the heels of his brown oxford shoes with his hands behind his back

A green green jelly bean man in a t-shirt that says GAY on it

A year ago, a new podcast came out, and with it brought me one of the silliest and most fun art projects I’ve ever been a part of. There’s plenty more art to come, but I wanted to do a bit of a review as I migrated and archived the old art from cohost onto here. Rather than filling up RSS feeds with over 50 drawings one at a time that many of you may have already seen, I’ve opted for this grid approach. Each one is clickable to go look at the original cohost post. Maybe I’ll update them to web-archive once cohost shuts down. Who knows?

Media Club Plus is a podcast by Friends at the Table and its premier season focused on Hunter X Hunter anime based on the manga by Yoshihiro Togashi. I’ve been listening to Friends at the Table for years, and I knew that the group behind Media Club Plus would be fun to listen to, even if I didn’t know anything about Hunter X Hunter (HxH). Part of the conceit of the podcast, after all, was that Jack De Quidt had also never watched the anime nor read the manga, so we would…

tags: #art #digital art #hxh #media club plus #friends at the table