Chapter Text
This first one, Mew, is my own idea. There's actually a few different reasons that I think this works fairly well. Shiny Mew is blue, and Mew learns Aura Sphere by level-up. This means that it is a suitably blue Pokémon with aura powers, which is a good starting point for ideas for what Ash could be. Mew is also a Kantonian Pokémon, which isn't really necessary for an idea to work, but it is a point in its favor. A Mythical Pokémon fits well for Ash's whole 'Chosen One' deal. Mew in particular is extra-mysterious and rare, but at the same time has an appearance which is overall unassuming. Ash could potentially claim there's not anything mysterious about him (a thing that he does in fact do when people point out how weird he is) because no one knows better. Heck, he himself could simply not really know what he is.
I imagine his powers would be different in some ways from a normal Mew. His psychic abilities are weak-to-nonexistent, meaning he can't fly or teleport or anything you'd really expect a Psychic-type to do. This does in fact mean that he has to walk around on his stubby cat legs. I don't know, I just sort of felt like psychic stuff didn't really suit Ash. Instead, he punches things because he still has all of the ridiculous superhuman strength canon Ash has. Also, he would retain Ash's special bond power thingy, where he synchronizes with Pokémon he has a bond of trust and friendship with and shares his strength, allowing them to use new abilities and moves they wouldn't be able to otherwise (If you're only familiar with earlier seasons, yes that is a real thing he can do).
Talking about the artwork itself, this is based on Ash's pose in his Diamond and Pearl artwork. I chose that artwork for the pose because it was the only one where he wasn't holding anything. The blue color I used is from flashbacks to the original series in the modern artstyle, from Ash's jacket. I felt that the deeper, more vibrant blue fit Ash better. The brown eyes are, of course, necessary, though apart from color I did follow Mew's eye design. The little zigzags, also necessary, since he's still Ash.
For his cap (also a necessity for any Ash design, boy needs his cool hat), I went with the partner cap. The main reason for this is actually just that I felt that viewing the hat head-on would look weird if it was the original series cap since it has a line down the middle, which the partner cap does not. The hat also has holes in its side, which is based on the Orange Unite Style Mew from Pokémon Unite, a game which I do not play.
As for technical details of the artwork, I started with a pencil sketch. He's actually much smaller than the piece of paper, a lot of it is taken up by notes. Some of which are about ratios so I get the proportions close enough to right, others of which are just random things like noting that Ash has to be kind of scruffy-looking and that Mew has tiny arms. Then, I took a photo of the part of the paper with the drawing on it with my phone, sent it to myself on discord, and then used it as a background while drawing over it in Inkscape for the lines, coloring, and shading. The shading is actually its own layer using the multiply blend mode, which means that I can adjust the colors of both the light and shadow parts separately to change the lighting without really changing anything about the image itself. I think that's pretty cool, though I haven't done anything with that here as of yet.