Miki Tanaka was born in Tokyo and originally studied English; her route into illustration ran through a side job painting fans and bamboo hats at a traditional Japanese dance prop shop in Asakusa. She paints in gouache on A4 watercolour paper, with very little shading variation and almost no outlines around her subjects, which gives her cards a flat, storybook quality that is unusual on the modern TCG. Her TCG debut was Slowpoke in Fossil, and she now sits on 208 cards plus 42 in Pokémon TCG Pocket, alongside long-running magazine and advertising work.
First card
Electabuzz
Jul 1, 1999
Latest card
Poochyena
Jan 30, 2026
Master Set
553 cards across English, Japanese and Simplified Chinese sets