The Pokémon series has expanded to many different genres over the years, as players have gone from catching and battling Pokémon, to snapping photos of them, even learning to type with them. And now it's time to draw 'em all, with Pokémon Art Academy for the Nintendo 3DS.

Developer HeadStrong Games (the same team behind the original Art Academy series) have combined the popular art application with the world of Pokémon, and the result is a wonderful entry-level tool for kids (or big kids) to learn how to draw and paint their favourite Pocket Monsters.

The game starts out in a very familiar way that will instantly make fans of the mainline Pokémon series feel very much at home, from the game asking “are you a boy or a girl?”, to meeting your “rival” art student and the academy's professor. You even get to choose which Pokémon will be your first subject from the customary initial choice of 3.

After a brief tutorial to learn the basic features of the software, you'll then be given a list of lessons to choose from. These early lessons focus on drawing just the head of various Pokémon in a very simplistic two dimensional style using flat colours, they also offer a lot of assistance in the form of animated tutorials performed by the professor and guidelines to follow as you draw. The game really holds your hand through these novice lessons and as a result you're almost guaranteed to finish up with a piece of artwork that looks just like the example image, but things don't seem to go quite as well for your in-game rival, who upon completing a lesson will reveal their efforts of the same subject which end up looking like they were drawn by a toddler. It's a great way to inject some humour into the proceedings though and can also make players feel a bit better about their own skills.

As you progress through the lessons you will unlock additional tools and gradually be taught more advanced techniques, the main lessons in a difficulty set culminate with a test where players get to use all of the skills they've learnt up to that point. Further lessons are also added to each difficulty level upon completing its finale, these generally serve as a way to use the same skills and techniques just on different Pokémon. Eventually players will lose the luxury of having guidelines, and will instead need to draw their own construction shapes and Pokémon details, lighting and shading are also introduced, meaning the amount of time it takes to complete lessons increases quite a bit. Thankfully there is an undo feature in this version of Art Academy (it's traditionally not included in the series) which can come in handy on the more complex lessons.

Another new feature of Pokémon Art Academy is the ability to apply pre-painted backgrounds to your finished artwork. This however is entirely optional, and any of the backgrounds you unlock can be used later on in the free paint mode. While this is a nice addition for novice artists to quickly and easily enhance their artwork, it is slightly disappointing that the game does not offer any lessons in creating your own backgrounds from scratch. It would have been nice to see at least a few tutorials on drawing environments, like forests and cities, Pokémon Centres or Gyms, even some of the human characters from the games and anime. But instead the focus is solely on the Pokémon themselves which does limit the overall variety somewhat.

It was also surprising to learn that there is no use of stereoscopic 3D, which might not seem like a big deal given the type of software this is, but seeing as eShop alternative Colours 3D makes excellent use of the feature, it is somewhat disappointing that Pokémon Art Academy does not. There is no playback system either, so it won't be possible to see how user creations took shape. Images can however still be uploaded and shared via Miiverse, and it seems that official competitions are being planned for the future. Another positive is how there doesn't appear to be any limitation on saving artwork, other than that of remaining free space on your SD card. And finished pieces can also be exported as a JPEG for easy viewing/sharing on other devices.

Pikachu is a big fan of N-Europe!