On my last few posts, I have been creating human/humanoid characters. In my most recent one, I made a mythical creature; for this post, I wanted to challenge myself again to make an animal character. Going off these ideas, I decided to base a character off of a unicorn (European), and a qilin (Chinese).
This character design was very easy. Both unicorns and qilin are often depicted with the body of a horse. However, qilin have the head of a dragon, as well as two horns that resemble deer antlers. For this design, I decided to go for a dragon head, but instead of two antlers, it would have the classic unicorn horn.
The color scheme was, as always, a bit difficult to come up with. I wanted to incorporate some of the green/blue color that qilin have on their body, but it wouldn’t work if it were to be blended with the white of the face. In the end, I just went for a simple off-white color. For the mane and tail, I went for an orange to yellow gradient. I wanted the hair to symbolize fire, which was often present in qilin statues and paintings.
All that was left to do was to draw the finished image. I wanted to go for a dynamic pose, so the character didn’t look boring. This post was a good way for me to practice animals, since drawing humans was getting kind of boring. Overall, I’m very happy with this design.
