Just a silly little sketch, but there's a story behind this.
A friend of mine got into an argument with me over some "too furry" renditions of the new Pokemon Black and White starters. Personally, I don't really like the way at least two of them look (the pig and the otter). I thought all three of them look like hodgepodges of starters past, for example the otter looks a lot like Piplup (or the bastard child of piplup and a Mime Jr.). The pig looks like a fire-based Chikorita with a snout and a spoink glued to its ass, and the grass type (while my favorite of the three) does look a lot like a mix between Cyndaquil and, like, Flygon or something. I complained.
My friend's response was "after making 500 of these you can't expect feature designs not to start overlapping". Understandable. But not an excuse in my book. When did it become okay to halfass originality? Just because it possible that something has been done before doesn't mean you should sellout and compromise on making it as unique as you like.
So his challenge to me then was to design an otter pokemon that doesn't look too much like another pokemon (his examples were buizel and bidoof) while still remaining very close to the official art style. So I tried.
Looking at it now, I'm not so sure I'd keep the bubble necklace but I like the shell 'ascot'. I'm not used to drawing "chibi" creatures like this still, so the body proportions gave me hell (arms and belly mostly) but I like how the feet came out. I really wanted to show the webbing as its a generally unique characteristic of otters. I threw in the pearl bellybutton as an afterthought, cause it didn't look "spiffy" enough to be a pokemon without some other baubles or designs (including the wave pattern on the tail that I tried a few times to do on the belly, but it didn't look right for some reason).

tl;dr
A friend of mine challenged me to come up with a unique design for an otter pokemon to make up for the less than inspired official one of the Water starter of Pokemon Black and White. This was what I came up with.