December Creature Exchange

Happy holidays, everyone! Hope y'all are having a good time. I've been sick for the past few days, but I somehow managed to get this finished!

For the wonderful ! Her prompt is here: comments.deviantart.com/1/4977…  The prompt was good! I like having a multiple options, and I had fun with the openness of it. That last line ("would probably also eat your cat/dog when you weren't looking") gave me a nice mental image of what you wanted. My mentor this time was , who did an amazing job redlining for me! Thanks so much for your help Khyros and Squidina both have really cool creature art, so be sure to check out their galleries!

This design is inspired by Chinese guardian lions, nudibranch, the ocean, and geckos.  Lot of process with this one. I was thinking about doing something water bear like in the early stages, but ended up going in a different direction. The initial sketches were more squishy: Ske1, Ske2. I also invested a lot of time in painting it (Ly1), but I wasn't Feeling It (and it kept glitching on me, haha) so I went this route instead! The palette that Squidina had works really well with the theme. Most of the time I just do simple backgrounds for these, but I lovelovelove drawing sea flora so here's a tide pool! I hid a bunch of other creatures in there, too.

Story:
This fat cutie watches over the tide pools, all while looking after a giant egg they discovered. They tend to be peaceful, but the minute anyone presents a threat to the pools, they become truly fearsome. Although they are strict about their job, they are friends with all the creatures nearby and within the pools. They enjoy lounging around with seals. They use their feelers/whiskers and strong sense of smell and hearing to get around.

(Feel free to disregard any of the story, and change their gender around if you'd like!)

Done through