i love love LOVE your designs sm, esp your lion characters! theyre so unique! did any of them take a lot of trial and error to design just right? and if so, which one(s)? theres gotta be fiddling with different concepts to some degree for all of them id think, but i imagine some mightve been harder to come up with than others?
((ps: i like your content and send asks pretty frequently, and from what i can tell, you seem like such a kind and genuinely cool person!! your work is also a big inspo for a younger artist like me!! i hope life has been treating you well!))
Aaaaah thank you!!!! Very flattered to hear that my work has made an impact on you :,]
As for the lions, I actually designed most of them once and right as I drew them, only having a vague idea of what I wanted beforehand. When I went on my lion designing spree, I specifically had a paper with some quick sketches of lion mane ideas and what they were meant to look like, such as a sunflower or egg- everything else was thought of on the spot. However, technically not all of these lions were invented within one year- about half I've actually owned for a long time, and were either pre-existing lion ocs or characters I redesigned into lions. Those were easier to because I already had some groundwork to work off of. Here's some examples;
All that said, I think the lions i struggled with the most were Molian and Ravencrow. Both technically came from old ocs, but I had trouble perfecting the balancing act between preserving that nostalgia and coming up with something fresh and good looking- I'm still not quite happy with either. Molian has way too much going on and RavenCrow's colors could use adjustment.
