Mulletsaurus #1

Yesterday I recieved the newest Creaturebox sketchbook and I decided to break out my old copy of Sketchbook Pro which was rotting away after watching their process DVD. Although I dislike a few things about the software I decided to give it another go, and gave myself an assignment starting with this little guy.

The goal is to do an iteration of this guy every day as a warm-up, and post it to this blog, critiquing it after every post and improving and iterating on the design each time. Here we go:

1. The pose is very static, lacking energy. One thing that inspires me the most about the Creaturebox guys is that even in a static pose there is a lot of energy in their designs through squashing of shapes. The tail and the arm I did a little bit of that but the body and head are lacking, I suppose the best place to play around with this is the neck area.
2. Inking, patterns, etc - aside from the little ridges on the tail and the hair there is no repetition anywhere, possibly making the teeth smaller or adding some sort of pattern on the gullet or belly would assist with this, in addition to adding some inferred form.
3. Rendering - I blame this on SBP, I started trying to paint in that program but the eraser tool is god awful, so after lines on the next iteration I'll be going to straight Photoshop. Also a secondary rim light is needed for this pose, but I got lazy. However, my focus here is lines and shapes, so I really don't want to get too crazy with the colors and rendering, 2 light sources max and very minimal approach.
4. Eyes- Very boring, assuming this is some sort of reptilian creature (with nipples?) I think some sort of angular ridge above the eyes would help a lot.