Project Name: A Wild Flareon Appears!
Project Goal: To depict Pokémon's Flareon (copyright Nintendo) as a real animal.

Project Process: This is from a series of realistic pokémon art (progress can be found here) where I use the same general process for each of the original 151 pokémon. The most important part of the process is that in order to maintain the most realistic depiction possible I don't manually construct any of the pokémon's features. Each part of the pokémon is gathered from a real animal, and all those parts are combined to form the whole.

In this particular example, I have used the body of a fennec fox, the ears of a cottontail rabbit, the mane of a white lion, and the bushy tail of a household cat. Pulling each image into Photoshop, I use the pen tool to cut out the parts I need and stitch them together. I then alter their color using the Hue/Saturation option, and blend the parts with a variety of brushes and tools.

Because the final piece resides primarily on DeviantArt, I use background stock images from other members. This way they too gain recognition, when the majority of the image consists of their photography skills. Background credit on this piece goes to DA member MatrixStock, and the actual image can be found here.