Something that you're missing in general - but also with regards to making them look like pokémon - is a good sense of shape.
Shape in character design is a bit of a bugger, because it is RIDICULOUSLY important for creating appealing characters, but it's a bit difficult to explain. The main thing to keep in mind is keeping a striking silhouette that isn't too "busy" and is distinctive. Good examples of that are early Disney (less so the more they produce, it seems), Team Fortress 2 (VERY MUCH SO) and, happily enough for you, Pokémon.
Remember those "Who's that Pokémon" things from the show? It wasn't just youthful obsessiveness that made them easy to identify, it was good silhouette design.
So, first, the easy part, is making sure anything you design has a strong, distinctive shape. There's a nice example here, from Aladdin that hopefully illustrates what I mean about distinctive shapes.
And here's a very nice article on CGSociety about general design ideas from Team Fortress 2 - the second page is what mostly focuses on the idea of character silhouettes, so if you're not interested in more general game design, skip there.
As regards getting the shape to look 'right' as a Pokémon, that's a little trickier. I honestly don't know what to suggest, beyond just studying the silhouettes of existing pokemon, and also trying to look at the shapes that they're constructed from. Break them down into simpler shapes, and look at how those shapes are used to construct the characters, and how the relative weights and proportions of each shape used are designed.
Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure a lot of the Pokémon designs actually take hints from classic cartoons like The Looney Toons and old Disney- unlike the human characters in the shows/games, the monsters have a really, really strong sense of shape and construction that makes each one look distinctive.
That said, I'm going to echo what others have said here and question why you're so stuck on fakemon. These work really well as more general monster designs, why get hung up on them being fakemon at all?
Although even if you DO ditch the fakemon thing
STILL READ WHAT I POSTED ABOUT SILHOUETTES. It is important regardless of what kind of character you're designing.
Shape in character design is a bit of a bugger, because it is RIDICULOUSLY important for creating appealing characters, but it's a bit difficult to explain. The main thing to keep in mind is keeping a striking silhouette that isn't too "busy" and is distinctive. Good examples of that are early Disney (less so the more they produce, it seems), Team Fortress 2 (VERY MUCH SO) and, happily enough for you, Pokémon.
Remember those "Who's that Pokémon" things from the show? It wasn't just youthful obsessiveness that made them easy to identify, it was good silhouette design.
So, first, the easy part, is making sure anything you design has a strong, distinctive shape. There's a nice example here, from Aladdin that hopefully illustrates what I mean about distinctive shapes.
And here's a very nice article on CGSociety about general design ideas from Team Fortress 2 - the second page is what mostly focuses on the idea of character silhouettes, so if you're not interested in more general game design, skip there.
As regards getting the shape to look 'right' as a Pokémon, that's a little trickier. I honestly don't know what to suggest, beyond just studying the silhouettes of existing pokemon, and also trying to look at the shapes that they're constructed from. Break them down into simpler shapes, and look at how those shapes are used to construct the characters, and how the relative weights and proportions of each shape used are designed.
Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure a lot of the Pokémon designs actually take hints from classic cartoons like The Looney Toons and old Disney- unlike the human characters in the shows/games, the monsters have a really, really strong sense of shape and construction that makes each one look distinctive.
That said, I'm going to echo what others have said here and question why you're so stuck on fakemon. These work really well as more general monster designs, why get hung up on them being fakemon at all?
Although even if you DO ditch the fakemon thing
STILL READ WHAT I POSTED ABOUT SILHOUETTES. It is important regardless of what kind of character you're designing.
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