As seen with Meowth and Persian, Krabby and Kingler, and many more to come, a large percentage of the original 151 Kanto Pokémon designs are simply real world animals with a little bit of extra detailing on them.
This makes finding reference to make them "realistic" very easy, but the challenge then becomes making that real world reference feel true to the character design.
Meowth and Persian here are inspired by mountain lions / pumas. A smaller, incredibly sleek big cat with very taught musculature made sense for them, considering that in the canon of the games, they're not particularly big animals.
Due to how majestic these two turned out, I thought it would be fitting to give them appropriate nicknames to match their regal demeanors:
NICKNAMES:
MEOWTH – HEIR
PERSIAN – NOBLE
Thanks for checking out my work!
by Mpickardart