He wanted something inspired by
this artwork by Justasuta. I started by doing some small, quick sketches in my sketchbook until I decided on a design I thought would be good:
(You can also see a couple thumbnails for the Grand Slam Cards)
I also had to practice drawing Giratina to make sure it would look right in the actual logo. It turns out, though, that Giratina is really hard to draw! Who knew?
I don’t know how many other artists really have this problem, but I’m a really, really slow learner. I wanted to figure out how to draw Giratina’s head well before I got too far into the design, because of course, the head is the most important part. So I tried to practice drawing it, but I just couldn’t figure out how those gold ornaments wrap around Giratina’s head. I would practice drawing it over and over again without getting consistent results. Basically, I had to just keep trying over and over and over again, trying slightly different ways of constructing it each time, until I learned how to consistently get it right. I traced over official artwork to get an idea of how to draw it, and tried drawing it from different angles not shown in any official works to see if I had internalized how it works.
Eventually, once I was confident I knew how to draw it, I drew a large version of the logo on newsprint. I’ve never had to draw a logo this large before, so I was definitely nervous about it, but It turned out really nice! I wish I had taken more photos during the process of drawing it to show how I put it together, but it didn’t occur to me at the time, and would have been really tedious anyway. I also decided on the font I wanted to use for the text by this point and drew the text as closely as I could to how it would look typed on my computer.
Next, I brought this photo into illustrator and traced over the artwork with basic flat shapes. We also decided we'd replace the little trainer that was supposed to be between "Shinto" and "Ruins" with the Griseous Orb:
After some feedback from rozes, we decided to sharpen Giratina’s tendrils, resulting in this basic design:
From this point on, I could proceed with refining the design. I decided on a color scheme I wanted in advance: I knew I wanted reds and yellows that stood out, so I chose a few shades of purple for the body and tendrils that would compliment them. I wanted to challenge myself to stick to just those colors (plus white for highlights), but after some experimenting, I was still having a really hard time deciding how I wanted the colors laid out. To fix this, I tried something new: I brought the image into Photoshop and did a rough “paintover” of the image with each of my specified colors using my tablet.
Having the freedom to paint over the image at any time made experimenting with the colors a lot easier and more interesting. This way, I could make changes really quickly without spending a ton of time drawing out each vector shape in Illustrator. Once I was happy with my color layout, I exported this image and imported it back into Illustrator, lowered the opacity, and used it as a guide to draw in the vector shapes there. And finally, that results in the final logo!
If you’ve read all the way through this, thanks for indulging me. Getting to see the process that goes into designing something is really valuable to anyone trying to figure out how to make their own work, I feel. I used to look at other artists’ and designers’ works and have no idea how they achieved it, and it would be overwhelming trying to study and learn from them. You also don’t get to see the struggle that goes into making that artwork, so it’s so easy to think that artists are just naturally talented, which can be demoralizing for someone still trying to learn. I hope the fact that I had to draw Giratina’s head like 27 times before I got it right helps disprove that!