You know what? Pokémon cards aren't beautiful enough. But someone is fixing that.
The cards you see above, which feature Spheal, Mawile and Magmar, are the handiwork of IKnowTheStruggle. IKnowTheStruggle uses acrylic paint to expand the backgrounds/illustrations featured on portions of Pokémon cards. Even though the quality of these pictures isn't the best, it's still clear that the results of the art project are stunning.
Here's a before and after shot of a Skitty card, so you can get a sense of the sorts of changes a card undergoes:
"I wanted to show as much of the art as I could, while still making it look like a Pokémon card," the artist wrote on Reddit.
Here's a few more cards.
Natu, Caterpie and Krokorok
Cubchoo and Palpitoad
And here's a close-up of Spheal, so you can get a sense of the detail.
Pretty fantastic, right?
The artist is taking commissions, in case you're interested.
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