Many players who have played Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have set up a picnic at some point during their adventure in Paldea. They set them up for many reasons; like to take a break and hang out with their Pokemon friends, to play with them, to watch and get mesmerized by some of the smaller Pokemon glide across the ground as they circle a ball (which is a real thing that still hasn't been patched to this day,) or to breed certain Pokemon together until they hatch the perfect shiny Pokemon. When it comes to Pokemon breeding, it can be a very boring and tedious task when you're breeding for shinies, only to get unlucky with a batch of 200+ eggs and no shiny hatches from any of them and then have to reset the game and restart the entire process all over again for another 30 minutes! Part of that process inspired this drawing as I thought to myself, "What if it wasn't so boring? What if waiting for the eggs were a little more fun? I need more practice drawing Typhlosion and I never drew a Ditto before so, why not make the breeding process look more fun while also making it wholesome, and cute?" And so, I drew this: A sleepy Typhlosion laying on top of a big, round, bouncy red ball with their Ditto partner sleeping on top of them during a bright and sunny day, the perfect kind of day to do some Pokemon breeding and breed the perfect shiny Cyndaquil!

I made myself a new desktop wallpaper for my new refurbished 4K monitor and I absolutely love how well this turned out! Not only that, but I wanted to get more practice in for drawing Typhlosion as they're still very difficult to draw! It doesn't help with the fact that I don't draw them often enough due to their overall complexity, but hey. I just need to draw them more often.

I attempted to draw this in Krita first as the layer limit in Procreate is very low at 28 layers for a 3840 x 2160 size canvas, but I ultimately decided to continue working on the drawing in Procreate instead, despite its limitations due to my iPad’s hardware being so weak. That's the 9th gen iPad for ya. (I need to upgrade to the iPad Pro at some point in the future.) Regardless of the limitations, I took on the challenge and broke it down into stages during the creation process. When I was getting close to the layer limit, I duplicated the drawing and proceeded to the next stage which involved merging certain parts of the original drawing together to make one layer for that particular part such as merging the colors and shading of Typhlosion's ball together to make 1 layer as opposed to 4. The same was also true for all the other environmental background elements. Regardless, this was challenging to do, but it was worth the experience and I love how well this turned out!