Pokemon Get Real In the Fusion Art of TastyPaints

Despite the mild science angle that exists in the world of Nintendo and Game Freak's Pokémon games, for the most part the franchise's internal logic can be summed up as "magical." It's not full of sorcery or anything, it just blends relatable concepts with a chunk of the fantastic in the name of fun. TastyPaints' "Real Life Pokemon" gallery taps into that kind of fusion perfectly, merging photographs of animals that exist in our world with digital painting and effects for some seamless Grade A pocket monster art.Playing off the more apparent real life animal influences seen in the original Pokemon Red and Blue titles, the Vermont-based TastyPaints used his graphic design skills to transform the ordinary into the pokéstordinary.

From TastyPaints' Flickr account:

Real Life Pokemon (RLP) is an exercise in the continued effort for me as an artist to develop a style within the realm of photo-manipulation. With this and the ones soon to come, I attempt to create a hybrid accurate-realistic approach, somewhere between the actual game/anime characters and realistic animals.

Perhaps more interestingly, this series was originally going to be much more violent, pitting Pokemon against Pokemon in what I envisioned as "Michael Vick's Pokefights." Pokemon seems, after all, a lot more like fantasy dog fighting than bug collecting, but that joke is getting old now.

See TastyPaints' photo manipulations of almost a dozen of the original pocket monsters including Pikachu, Venusaur, Charmander, Cubone, Staru, Blastoise, Kakuna, Scyther, Magnemite, Diglett and Pinsir below:

[Via Geekologie]