A few days ago, I stayed up insanely late since I couldn't sleep and in the end, gave up on trying and spent most of the night and next morning drawing and experimenting with style. One of the things I've been trying to change (largely due to being inspired by Lavawolf) is different ways to draw eyes to make them more expressive and communicate more character. I'm still reluctant to include a separate line for the eyebrow for the really ridiculous reason that I decided years and years ago ago I wanted to be different and not do that (even though it probably would give a wider range of emotions). I've also been trying to figure out how to draw mouths that are actually open and have them look decent.

This started out as a page of random disembodied heads with a huge array of different kinds of eyes (from tiny dots to anime eyes bigger than the rest of their heads) floating around making silly expressions. I'm still not quite sure where this guy came from (or why he's an otter when I never really draw otters), but I liked the way his head turned out so much I erased everything else and thought I'd add a bit of detail, draw a neck, and stuff like that. I never had a total image for this picture until I was done. I just kept adding a little more, sticking a random limb here, a loop in the rope over here, another line there, and not really thinking about it.

The plants are a little funny to me. I started out with things that looked vaguely like palm trees, and then was like "I like bamboo trees. That'd look cool. Let there be bamboo trees! *poof*" This continued until there was a totally paradoxical combination of plantlife. Still, it seemed to fit for some odd reason. After that, I thought bamboo trees look really cool at night so I threw in a moon.

Anyway, I'm actually quite proud of how it turned out and I think I'm finally getting the hang of torso anatomy, which is something I've been focusing on for a while now. The only part that I totally goofed up on was the footpaws. They'd fit fine on a canine or feline, but I really have no idea what otter paws look like and I wasn't about to get out of my warm bed at 4:00am to go look it up.

I still wonder what on earth he's looking at that's making him smile like that, though. Anyway, I'm planning to eventually colour this (or try) and see if I can avoid blotching up the entire thing.

Oh, and thanks again Muke for scanning stoofa for me!