Poké Ball Splatter Collection

Honestly, this one wasn't strategic. I love Pokémon, I love splatter and grunge textures, and at some point I started dropping Poké Balls into Illustrator to see what happened. After doing this long enough, a lot of the design decisions just happen on their own: proportions, color, where the texture lands. So this isn't a story about a problem I set out to solve. It's what came out when I let the things I actually like collide.

I worked through six balls: Poké Ball, Great Ball, Ultra Ball, Master Ball, Premier Ball, and Cherish Ball. Each one got stripped each one down to its essential shape and color, then layering splatter over the top. The silhouette had to stay readable from across a room; the surface needed to feel like something I'd thrown at the wall instead of printed flat. That part I can articulate after the fact. While I was making them, it just felt right.

The set ended up working two ways. Each piece holds up on its own as a print, but together they read as a collection: same construction, same texture language, same restraint about where the splatter is allowed to land. From there I pulled the artwork onto apparel, and the splatter actually plays harder on a shirt than on a wall. The texture reads as garment ink instead of paint, which wasn't planned but ended up being the better version of the idea.

What I like about this project is how little I had to change to make it feel different. The shapes are the same shapes everyone already knows. The work is all in the surface.