For years, scans of Sugimori Ken’s original watercolour artwork of the first two generations of Pokémon species have circulated online. For the first time, high quality scans of the artwork are being shared with the Pokémon community in the hopes of archiving them.
The drawings depict the first 251 Pokémon to appear in the games and were uploaded by YouTuber and Pokémon archivist LewTwo to Twitter. The scans were sent to Lewtwo by Twitter user ExcaliburZero_Z.
The old scans are believed to have originated from the Pokémon Red and Blue Player’s Guide, Lewtwo explained, where they ended up with “inaccurate colors, were often misshapen, and generally very low quality”.