HatBastion's Godzilla Holding a Heart
This little guy was a lot of fun to put together! My client was looking for a cute, chubby Godzilla holding a heart for their community to use. I loved the idea, and after we pulled together some references and agreed on a few colors, I started pixel-pushing.
A few iterations were all it took to settle on lizard boi's head shape, tail arrangement, how he's holding the heart, and so on. The hardest part of this piece was figuring out the best way to dither it, to suggest the texture of his scaly skin. That's super hard at this resolution, so I opted to shade the dithering itself, once a good pattern was established. It's a rarely-used technique due to how hard it is to get forms correct, but it worked here.
The way he blinks and opens his mouth also brought a lot of personality to the emote, without a whole lot of rework! Since we ran out of vertical pixels to get a really big RAWR, I went with turning his head back a little bit, and shaded the teeth pixels in-place to give the illusion of depth in limited space.
This asset was originally animated, and I lack an easy way to watermark it in that form. Thus, only a static thumbnail for now. To see it in action, visit my client's stream.