Pokémon Art Academy Will Unleash Your Inner Artist!

Pokémon Art Academy is a new game for the Nintendo 3DS that will help you uncover the potential of your inner artist while drawing some of your favorite Pokémon!

In the new game, players attend the Pokémon Art Academy under the mentorship of famed Pokémon card artist Professor Andy to master drawing and painting among other artistic skills.

Professor Andy walks players through 40 lessons that will guide them each step of the way to creating amazing Pokémon art. These lessons start out simple, teaching the basics with a quick pastel drawing, getting more difficult as the game progresses. As you continue to play, new tools are introduced that take a little more skill to use, but create impressive results!

The game utilizes the Nintendo 3DS stylus to create these works of art. In addition to drawing on the screen, it's used to select tools, colors and more. The stylus is surprisingly responsive and precise, allowing you to be as careful and detailed as you please!

As you play, new lessons will unlock new tools to add to your artistic arsenal. Over time, the outline pen, markers, pastels, colored pencils, paintbrushes, airbrush and smudge stick will all become your best friends. Each tool has different pros and cons, and it's up to you to decide which tools you love best to discover your own style.

Initial lessons make use of tracing to get the basic shapes for your art, but as they continue, outlines are taken away and you must create your own shapes and details. While this makes lessons a lot tougher, they'll really enhance your drawing ability, and make the piece your own!

Players make their way through normal, apprentice and graduate lessons, each ending in a review that uses the new skills you've acquired to create a different version of Pikachu. You'll get to draw some of your favorite Pokémon from all 6 generations, such as Pikachu, Charizard and Vulpix from the classic games to newer characters like Froakie, Fletchling and Fennekin, and many in between!

All the while, you'll be working alongside another aspiring student artist named Lee. He never seems to quite master the artistry of painting Pokémon, and his drawings are sure to be put to shame by your wonderful Pokéart. Still, his dedication to his craft continues to inspire!

During each lesson, you'll not only learn drawing techniques, but also handy facts about the Pokémon you're rendering. After all, the better you know the Pokémon, the more lifelike your drawing will be!

The game also features super handy shortcuts, including the ability to undo a move with the L button or redo it with R, and zoom in and out with the D-pad.

After each lesson, your creation is posted on your own autographed Pokémon card, with optional backgrounds that bring your image to life. You can even share them online with friends!

Plus, the game has more than 100 reference images to help you test out your skills without guidance from Professor Andy. You can even snap pictures in real life to use as reference!

However, the game does have a couple of downsides. The background music is pretty limited, and gets stale fast. The game would really benefit from bringing in the iconic music from the RPG games in the Pokémon series, which also appears in the television shows and spin-off titles like Super Smash Bros.

Additionally, when it comes time to create your own guide shapes based on provided template, the background color and the pencil color choices their offer sometimes unfortunately blend together, making it difficult to interpret the shapes you should be creating. Usually, this is solved in subsequent steps, so it's not a major issue.

Overall, Pokémon Art Academy is an incredible game that will help you to create art like you never imagined you could. The game is surprisingly easy to pick up and learn, and will teach you techniques that you can actually use in real-life drawing and painting.

The game is a must for Pokémon fans, but we also recommend it to art fans who aren't so interested in the Pokémon series. Gamers of all ages will be impressed with their own abilities, especially in the final steps of a lesson as everything beautifully comes together!

Pokémon Art Academy releases tomorrow, October 24, so be sure not to miss it!

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Disclaimer: Sweety High received a free download code for Pokémon Art Academy for review.