We're on Day 6 of our journey around the entire Hohen region. After yesterday's exploration of the Route 111 Desert and the subsequent collapse of Mirage Tower, our adventure carrot turns west to begin his climb of Mount Jimmy with the ultimate goal of reaching Lavarage by nightfall. I'm slowly trailing behind, but there's no time to waste. We've got a long adventure ahead of us, and the nearby Pokémon are getting restless. Day 6 begins with the southern side of Route 112. After my hit close call escape from Mirage Tower, I drag myself to the desert outskirts and finally started off painting again. This is another one where I wanted to recreate the original in-game view pretty closely, but with some added depth. A simple tilt of the camera goes a long way with that. Or not the in-game camera, a tilt of my head in the very real world of Pokémon that I currently inhabit. Oh, and I'm not alone. While I was wandering through this mountainous region of Hohen, I bumped into two others, previous commenters from this series. I first found Anthony Tails traveling alone with his swamper, a long way from his home in Brazil, spotting that iconic yellow and green soccer team. We both got curly hair and soccer teams around from in Australia also wear green and gold, so talking to him was kind of like looking into a mirror. He was on his way to Morville, so our chat didn't last that long. While he had south, I'm stuck playing catch-up with carrot heading up the mountainside instead. Further along though, I ran into Steven Paulson, a true veteran of the Hohen region. He told me about his first travels around the region, back when he was only 13. He's since filled up his whole Pokédex, and the final Pokémon for the longest time out of his reach was Smirgel, who he travels with to this day, sketching along the way, a lot like me actually. But with both of those new Pokémon crossed off of our decks, we've got a mountain to climb, so let's move on to the cable car up the side of Mount Chimney. Before we can see the top of volcano, we've got to get right up the side of this mountain, and the only up from here without an intense vertical hike is via the cable car. So away we go. By far, the coolest part of the trip to Love Ridge Town is this view right here. Being able to look out over the entire southern side of the Hohen region is just so cool. Getting to see how far we've come, even just since landing on Sleephot Beach, and the journey that it took to get here, looking out the cable car window now really puts all of that into perspective. My first adventure through the Pokémon World was in Canter, and some of my favourite Canter Pokémon are from the Polywagline. So that's who I've brought with me here today, my good old Polyworld. But stepping out of the story here for a second, every now and then I like to stream these paintings as I work on them. So with this one, I figured it'd be fun to try making a simple animation that I could use for stream UI. Just a little three-frame animation with me and my Polyworld traveling up the side of the mountain here. In Universe, the blank screen up top would show the next stop and distance to the destination, right? So I figured I'd use that for a stream starting and ending display instead. Throw in a little extra movement of the cable car, a slight wobble in the breeze as we move up the mountain, and there we go. A simple little animation for starting with my painting streams. But now we're approaching the top of the mountain, so the next stop is Mount Chimney. With the sun beginning to set in the west, there's a bit of time-pression out of reach to Loverage before nightfall. And I don't know about you, but getting stuck out and jagged past in the dead of night doesn't really sound like the best idea to me. Stepping out of the cable car here though, the first thing I noticed is the intense heat and that strong egg smell coming from the sulfur of the volcano. It's an odd scent, but I'm not gonna lie, I can't kind of like it. It reminds me of my trip to Japan last year, visiting the hot springs up in the mountains. Up the peak of the mountain here, there's a crazy view looking over the edge. Mount Chimney stands a kilometer and a half tall, so you can see the whole region off in the distance way below. Back to the painting though, it's been a while since I've included characters from in the actual game, so this time around I wanted to bring Mayback. She first appeared in the old ale town painting with her torchic and then again in cycling road with Kambuskin, and by now she's trained her team up and off to have a blazekin by her side. I suppose character groveyle would probably be evolving sometime soon too, but I honestly haven't thought that much about his team before. I've been making it up as I go, but it might be time to try working a more concrete story into each of these paintings. This is about when the story starts ramping up a bit too, since Maxi's over here planting his medial piece trying to reactivate the volcano, which probably isn't a great sign for what's to come, but I'm sure carrot will save the day somehow, probably, right? Speaking of carrot, he's back at long last wandering down Jagged Pass. Honestly, doing the thumbnails for these paintings is probably the most challenging part. Once the actual painting starts, it's time to just turn your brain off and push paint around until it's done. It's super low pressure because you can only make where your subconscious is already capable of making, right? So for me at least, there's no pressure to make a really great looking painting at that stage. It really is just about pushing paint around, but with thumbnailing, it's pretty different. In the thumbnailing stage, you're actively deciding what direction you want to go in, what story you're going to tell, which angle you're going to view the scene from, the colors you'll be using, and all of that. So since you can go in any direction at that stage, the challenges in finding which direction is going to be the most fun or interesting. So I guess for me, it just takes a lot more active focus. I can't go throwing on a YouTube video for background noise. Also, this is the first painting I tried doing on-string live, and I learned really quickly how much harder it is to focus on painting when there's an audience watching you every step of the way. It's fun, but when there's that added pressure to the entertaining, I don't know, man, I'm used to just sitting in silence and drawing away. So trying to talk while also painting, it's something else. But it is fun though, so keep your eyes peeled for the next time I go live. Before departing Jagged Pass though, Carrot bumped into Nightmare Shadows, another commenter from this series, they were travelling in the opposite direction with their bagel on heading off to Meteor Falls to look for more dragon type Pokemon. I wonder if we'll bump into them again once we get over there too. And now finally, we've reached Love Ridge Town just before nightfall. I wasn't sure what direction to go in with this one, but I knew I wanted to redesign the town just a little bit. I was thinking this being a hot springs town, why doesn't it have a big Japanese style bathhouse anyway? Again, I went to Japan last year and stayed up in a little town called Nozawa on-sand while I was there, and you couldn't walk 15 meters without running into another bathhouse or hot spring, they were everywhere. There was hot water constantly flowing through the town as well, down these little canals on either side of the road. I think to help melt the snow, so it wouldn't block roads and give us driveways, but it was all just natural hot spring water, flowing up from below. And it carried that strong sulfur smell over it too. Ah, I miss it so much, I can't wait to go back. But anyway, I wanted to try and work a little more of that vibe into this painting, so I gave the town a little more variation in its elevation, added in a bathhouse up the entrance of the town, and really tried to emphasize the mountains on either side some more. After arriving here though, Carrot's first stop was of course going to be the hot springs. From there, he had a great view of two local trainers battling it out up the back of town. Jerry the insatiable and Mootchi pitting their agron and dragon are up against each other. But that's not all. Do you remember back in day 5 when we passed the daycare and Carrot picked up that mysterious egg from the daycare man? It looks like all that hot water from the spring was just the push it needed to start the hatch. And lo and behold, wait a second, is that the great king of all cosmos? You know what time it is, sneak peak for day 7. Next time we're going to be heading off in the direction of the meteor falls. It'll be quite the trek having to hike up through the suit covered mountainside of northern hoen but a trip worth taking. To slow down for a second though, when I first started this series I wasn't sure how far I'd even get into it. I didn't really know how to paint all that well at the time and I knew far less about making videos. The early episodes of this series are rough. But if you haven't seen them before, the playlist is up on screen now. You can also find all the project files up on my Patreon page for all of these paintings, along with a bunch of free wallpaper downloads of the paintings in this series. Check them out if you want to and bye bye!