BULBASAUR 
Made this simple Bulbasaur sculpt few months back, but never really rendered it:
Since I’ve been wanting to try out some hybrid PBR + NPR rendering, this felt like a good bite-sized project to give it a try!
Sculpt made with iPad on Nomad Sculpt:
I kept the look explorations quite subtle for this project, but I’ll try to cover the overall key ideas for this
Shadows are not actual shadows:
I’m using instead one light source as a “projection” like any toon shader, but where this differs from a toon shader, is that I use that projection as a mask (combine with AO), that I then use to show instead an alternative texture.
This gives me total control over the look of the shadow: tint, value, dynamic range and even level of detail. In this case I blurred out my base texture (Median Blur filter in Photoshop) and CC’d it to achieved the desired look.
Normal map is active only in the highlights :
One of the things I’m trying to achieve, is to get closer to a painterly look - and another way to achieve that while preserving the properties of PBR, was to remove the normals from the shadow areas. All that is also controlled by the light projection, masking in and out where the normal map should be on / off.
Shadow terminators:
Still very early ideation, and will try to improve the approach in the future.
To start, some might ask “what is a shadow terminator?”
A shadow terminator is the line that marks the transition between light and shadow on an object. That transition line has often been used in art (wether it’s caravaggio or ghibli) to add extra richness, warmth, hue variations, and material properties (for instance subsurface scattering)
And I noticed this hasn’t been developed that much in the 3D realm, so I wanted to dip my toes into that (spoiler alert, it’s very subtle)
Rimlight:
For the rimlight, I simply followed the approach of Paul Ruano-Borbalan (can be found here: https://80.lv/articles/artist-recreates-marvel-rivals-lighting-effect-with-blender-eevee/ ) helped making this boy look SHARP!
I’m planning on trying out other things, and fine-tune this painterly / anime look more in the future 
You can see more of my work here: