The artists
you should know
Three illustrators, thirty years.
A few weeks ago I asked a friend who has been collecting Pokémon seriously for about a decade if he could name the artist who drew Base Set Charizard. He thought about it for a long moment and said, with the slight embarrassment of someone realizing they should know the answer, that he didn't.
This is, I think, a fairly representative response. The Pokémon Trading Card Game has, since 1996, employed somewhere between two and three hundred different illustrators. A handful of these have produced work so culturally important that the cards themselves are now traded as significant cultural artifacts — Base Set Charizard at its peak grade now sells for more than half a million dollars. And yet the names of the people who actually made these images are, outside small circles of dedicated fans, almost completely unknown.
This is partly the convention of the medium. Trading cards have always credited their artists in small type at the bottom of the image, and the credit is easy to overlook. It is also partly the way the franchise itself has been promoted: Pokémon, the brand, presents itself as a unified whole, with the individual contributors largely invisible. There is no equivalent in this hobby of the way comic readers know Jack Kirby or the way film audiences know Roger Deakins.
But there should be. The cards we love are not products of an anonymous corporate machine. They are made by specific people, with specific sensibilities, working over decades to develop styles that are as distinctive as those of any working artist. And once you start paying attention to the names — once you can recognize a Mitsuhiro Arita Charizard from twenty feet away, or know which Eeveelutions came from Atsuko Nishida's pen — the cards become, immediately, more interesting.
This is a piece about three of those practitioners.
Mitsuhiro Arita
If there is a single foundational figure in Pokémon TCG illustration, it is Mitsuhiro Arita.
Born in Fukuoka Prefecture in 1970, Arita came to the Pokémon Trading Card Game at its inception in 1996. He had no formal art training — he is, by his own account, completely self-taught — and was working as a freelance illustrator with no particular reason to expect that the small gig of producing cards for a Japanese trading card game would become the central work of his life. He was approached by an editor named Keiji Kinebuchi to contribute to the original 102-card Base Set. He produced, among other cards, the illustration of Charizard.
The Charizard he drew is, by some distance, the single most recognizable piece of Pokémon art ever made. The pose — wings flared, neck extended, flame breath arcing across the right of the frame — has become one of those images that exists in the cultural water supply, recognized by people who have never played the game and could not name the artist if asked. Arita has spoken about the technical difficulty of the piece, which had to satisfy printing constraints he had never worked with before.
What is interesting about Arita's career, and what makes him worth knowing about, is that he never became a one-card artist. After Base Set he could have settled into the comfort of a guaranteed name. Instead he kept working, across every era, with continuously evolving technique. His early style — watercolor and pastel with distinct outlines — has given way over the decades to something more painterly, with attention to dramatic lighting and atmospheric depth. He attempts, by his own description, to depict Pokémon "as though they were appearing in a nature documentary," with realistic expressions and detailed backgrounds. The Lugia he produced in 2022 looks, when you put it next to the 1999 Charizard, like a different artist entirely — not in any sense worse, simply more developed.
He also has the rare experience for any working artist of being able to attend a public event and find the people who collect his work. He signs cards at Pokémon conventions on a regular basis. The line for an Arita signature at a major event can run for hours. The cards he signs, particularly older ones with his autograph in silver paint pen, become themselves desirable artifacts — a 1st Edition Base Set Charizard signed by Arita can sell for tens of thousands of dollars more than the same card unsigned. The market has, in this small way, found a way to compensate the man whose work it has been trading for thirty years.
If you collect Pokémon, you have at least one Arita card in your binder. Almost certainly several.
Atsuko Nishida
Atsuko Nishida is the most consequential single artist in the history of Pokémon, and there is a reasonable case that most people in the hobby don't know who she is.
She came up through the early days of Game Freak, working on the studio's pre-Pokémon project Pulseman alongside the franchise's eventual creator Satoshi Tajiri and its art director Ken Sugimori. When the original Pokémon games were in development, Sugimori produced initial designs that skewed scary; he later realized the project also needed cute creatures to balance the roster. He turned to Nishida, who designed Pikachu.
The first Pikachu, by Nishida's own description, was based on a daifuku — a Japanese rice cake — with ears. It was vertically elongated, rounder, less mouse-like than what we eventually got. Nishida revised the design, basing it instead on a squirrel. The famous cheek pouches were borrowed from squirrel anatomy, where they store food. The result is the most recognizable cartoon character of the last thirty years, and quite possibly the most commercially valuable single drawing in the history of Japanese illustration.
If she had stopped there, Nishida would still be a major figure. She did not stop there. She went on to design Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle — the Kanto starter trio, the three Pokémon that introduced an entire generation of children to the franchise. She designed most of the Eeveelutions, including Glaceon and Sylveon and the famously beloved Umbreon. (Jolteon and Flareon are the exceptions, designed by other Game Freak artists.) Across the franchise's thirty years, she has continued to produce designs for new generations of Pokémon, including several Paldean entries in 2024.
But what concerns us here is her work on the actual trading cards. Nishida has been illustrating Pokémon TCG cards since the Team Rocket set in 2000, and has produced more than four hundred individual card illustrations across that span. Her style is the precise opposite of Arita's nature-documentary realism. Where Arita reaches for atmosphere, Nishida reaches for charm. Her cards depict Pokémon as if they have personalities, often in slightly anthropomorphic poses, with expressions that veer toward the cute. She is the artist most likely to draw a Spoink mid-bounce or a Vanillite looking confused. The cards are, quite straightforwardly, fun.
The piece of her work that has made the loudest noise commercially is the Pikachu Illustrator card — the rarest Pokémon card in existence, distributed in 1998 as a prize for an art contest run by CoroCoro Comic. Only thirty-nine copies were ever made. The artwork shows Pikachu holding a paintbrush, drawn by the artist who created Pikachu. In 2022, a PSA 10 copy sold privately to Logan Paul for $5.275 million, setting a Guinness World Record for the most expensive Pokémon card ever sold. In a sense, this card is the purest possible expression of what Nishida has done for the franchise: she made the character; she drew the card; the card became, decades later, the most valuable single artifact the hobby has ever produced.
KEIICHIRO ITO
The third name on this list is by far the youngest in the hobby. KEIICHIRO ITO debuted in the Pokémon TCG in 2019 with Magmortar, a competent but unremarkable common in the Sun & Moon — Unified Minds set. He produced perhaps thirty cards across the next two years, all in the standard house style, none of them chase cards. He had not, as of mid-2021, given any obvious public indication that he was about to change the trajectory of modern Pokémon illustration.
Then Evolving Skies released, with his Umbreon VMAX Alternate Art inside it, and the trajectory changed.
It is possible to overstate how much one piece of art can do for an artist's reputation, but in this case the overstatement is hard to manage. Moonbreon — as collectors immediately renamed the card — became, within months of release, the most valuable modern card in the hobby. Five years later, it remains in that position. The piece is a study in negative space and atmospheric lighting: a black fox sitting on a rooftop tile, a sleeping city below, a full moon above. It does not look like other Pokémon cards. It looks, more than anything, like an illustration that wandered in from a different medium — a manga panel, a film still, a page from an art book.
What makes ITO worth knowing is that the Moonbreon piece was not, despite its reputation, a fluke. He has continued to produce cards across the four years since, and his subsequent work consistently shows the same compositional sensibilities — the comfort with negative space, the willingness to render Pokémon in mood rather than action, the sense that an illustration can imply a story rather than depict one. He is, in other words, a real artist with a real style, and the Umbreon piece was the first time most collectors got to see that style operating at full scale.
He represents, in a sense, the contemporary version of what an artist's career can look like in this hobby — the artist who comes up not over thirty years of consistent contribution but in a single moment of cultural breakthrough, recognized almost in real time, signing cards for fans within four years of his career-defining piece.
Why this matters
The simple reason it matters to know who made the cards in your binder is that knowing makes the cards better.
Once you can recognize an Arita card from across the table — the slightly grainy texture, the dramatic backlighting, the realism of expressions — your relationship to the cards changes. They stop being samples from an undifferentiated catalog and start being objects with provenance. You begin to follow specific artists across sets the way film fans follow directors across decades.
This is not just a romantic point. It is also useful. Cards illustrated by major artists tend, on average, to hold value better than cards illustrated by anonymous ones, because the collectors who care about authorship are, by definition, the collectors who hold for the long term. A Moonbreon is worth what it is worth partly because it is a Moonbreon and partly because it is a KEIICHIRO ITO. Both of these reasons matter.
But the romantic point is also true. The cards are art, made by people, and the people are interesting. Arita is in his mid-fifties, still working, still producing some of the best Charizard art in the hobby. Nishida designed Pikachu in her twenties and is still designing Pokémon in her sixties. ITO is somewhere in the early phase of what could be a three-decade career. There is a continuous tradition here, with practitioners and a lineage, and the practitioners are, almost all of them, still alive and still working.
It is worth knowing the names.