u/Felifeli

Hi Reddit! I’m Feli, I’ve worked professionally in several industries as a concept artist throughout my career. Thought I’d share something that still hurts a lot to this day, but was nice while it lasted. During late 2024/early 2025, I was working as a contractor for a company that worked as a third-party product creator for certain official brands and got to create concepts for a whole bunch of stuff, including Sanrio, Marvel, some Netflix series like Wednesday and Stranger Things, Minecraft, Sonic, Disney, and my ultimate favorite: Pokémon Company Intl. Before I joined the studio, Pokémon only allowed the team to create Pokéball lamps, no characters allowed. After a meeting with our Pokémon representative in which I illustrated some light up statues of Sabrina, Mailman Dragonite and Celebi for the upcoming pitch (can’t post those because of NDAs, sadly) apparently the meeting went so well that we were immediately greenlit to start making Pokémon character statues (among other awesome concepts my colleagues came up with for other types of product) and I was assigned to doing Pokémon character statues specifically and exclusively. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, a dream come true being a lifelong Pokémon fan myself, and so I got straight to drawing.

I wanted to take the statue concepts to the next level, and so I came up with some card holder concepts to display cards, and I wanted the statues to match the cards as a theme, so I went ahead and illustrated some card art to go along with them, even if TCG wasn’t my area.

Unfortunately two weeks after I got the best news and gig of my life, the tariffs hit the toy industry and it pretty much wrecked everything. I was let go and out of a job without even being able to present the concepts above to Pokémon because of how sudden it all was.

To this day, I’m gutted, but I hope some of you can enjoy these nonetheless. And I also hope to make these a physical reality one way or another!

Hi Reddit! I’m Feli, I’ve worked professionally in several industries as a concept artist throughout my career. Thought I’d share something that still hurts a lot to this day, but was nice while it lasted. During late 2024/early 2025, I was working as a contractor for a company that worked as a third-party product creator for certain official brands and got to create concepts for a whole bunch of stuff, including Sanrio, Marvel, some Netflix series like Wednesday and Stranger Things, Minecraft, Sonic, Disney, and my ultimate favorite: Pokémon Company Intl. Before I joined the studio, Pokémon only allowed the team to create Pokéball lamps, no characters allowed. After a meeting with our Pokémon representative in which I illustrated some light up statues of Sabrina, Mailman Dragonite and Celebi for the upcoming pitch (can’t post those because of NDAs, sadly) , apparently the meeting went so well that we were immediately greenlit to start making Pokémon character statues (among other awesome concepts my colleagues came up with for other types of product) and I was assigned to doing Pokémon character statues specifically and exclusively. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, a dream come true being a lifelong Pokémon fan myself, and so I got straight to drawing.

I wanted to take the statue concepts to the next level, and so I came up with some card holder concepts to display cards, and I wanted the statues to match the cards as a theme, so I went ahead and illustrated some card art to go along with them, even if TCG wasn’t my area.

Unfortunately two weeks after I got the best news and gig of my life, the tariffs hit the toy industry and it pretty much wrecked everything. I was let go and out of a job without even being able to present the concepts above to Pokémon because of how sudden it all was.

To this day, I’m gutted, but I hope some of you can enjoy these nonetheless.