Between Week 7 and 8 I took the time to try out a whole bunch of designs for Heishi, my trickster dragon character. I’ve collected a good range of references, though one which played a vital part was Mushu from Mulan. His impact is apparent in pretty much every stage of my design process.

Here are the images I gathered for reference:

And here is my somewhat chaotic design process!

These were my initial drawings. As you can see I had a pretty solid idea for his physical features (horns, moustache, beard) but I wanted to really focus on exploring the rest of the features, such as the nose, ears and eyes.

With continued experimentation, I decided that a round nose combined with cat-like eyes would look the best. At this point I still wasn’t sure which ears to go with, but I ended up dropping the wide ‘enhanced’ ears found in the middle of the top row and the bat-like ears found in the top right.

It was also at this point I began considering hair, as clearly there weren’t enough elements on the face already and I just had to add more.

After a lengthy process I was able to finalize my design. The final changes I decided were to enlarge the tusks and consider different horn designs. I ended up going with the middle design, as you can see in this picture:

Here I also took the time to think about what object my character could use. Without making the design process more complicated, I decided to go with a simple drawing pin, which the character would use to poke other characters and cause mischief.