Creating the final character - pet dinosaur

 The next character I decided to work on, was the dinosaur, the one that definitely made caused me a lot of stress while sketching, because it is my first time creating a dinosaur character. My tutor has told me which of the sketches he liked most and I took that into consideration and decided that I should really go with that sketch but simplify it a little bit. 

This is the sketch I decided to work with:

I started, of course, by tracing the sketch and making slight changes. The first change I decided to make, was to change the placement of the dinosaur's arms. I needed them to be a little bit lower so the character would look more natural. 

I think this change was really good for the character.

Another change to make was to make the dinosaur's feet smaller because the big feet I created in the sketch make me think about a Big Foot more than a dinosaur. I needed the feet to be smaller and have those three sharp toes so they look like dinosaur feet. 

I was quite happy with these feet and on this step of creating the character I did not notice one more thing wrong about the feet. I noticed it when coloring the character in, but since I am discussing the feet here I am going to mention this mistake now. The space between the two feet is what is wrong here. It is always important to make the negative space interesting and never to leave a small spot of a negative space, like I left here between the legs. I did not see it at first but I realized it in time to still make the change. 

I changed it by simply removing the line and making the leg behind a little fatter, which worked well because it matched the front leg more. 

The next thing I did was pick out the color palette for the character. Of course I needed it at least a little bit purple, but I did not want to make the entire character purple, because I wanted it to contrast a little bit from the family since the character is not related by blood to the family. I looked at the color wheel and looked at the color on the other side of the color wheel of the shade of purple I liked. 

Here I got two colors that are exactly opposite from each other on the color wheel on the Procreate app. Those colors reminded me of an already existing character from My Little Pony, and that character's name is Spike. 

Spike

When remembering about this character - a dragon from my little pony, I was glad I decided not to make my character entirely purple because I know it would look to much like Spike and I like being inspired by someone's work, but I would never want someone to think my characters are a knock-off of an already existing successful character. I decided on the color palette for my dinosaur to be only four colors and here they are:

 

I think those colors are simple and they fit my character well. With this color palette it will definitely contrast the rest of my characters. 

My last step was to color the character in and here is a video of my entire work process:

My last step as always is to come up with a name for the character. As I mentioned before, it is a small dinosaur who is an animal abuse survivor. Their personality is strong and they are very brave. I want my name to scream that. It is not a scary dinosaur that I would call something like Rex from T-Rex, it is more vulnerable and sensitive, but still brave. When thinking about all those traits of character I thought that this character is really unique when it comes to its personality, especially since it is a pet, not a main character. I decided to look at the word Unique in different languages and the one that did not let me down was Spanish where unique is único and I think Unico is a very nice name for a pet. 

So there it is, a dinosaur named Unico.