Drawn during Anthrocon 2011

This was drawn for the same fellow who asked me last year to draw a reclining "Scratte" from Ice Age 3 but drawn with humanoid proportions, and he returned this year with a new request to feature these two characters from the movie Alpha & Omega. I suppose it would have helped if I'd seen the movie but he had printouts of the characters for reference material which was great in helping to get the likeness fairly accurate.

"Fairly accurate" is the operative word here however... let me digress for a moment and talk a bit about character design. Generally speaking the job of a character designer is to tell the audience something about who this personality is via visual shorthand. Some of the most amazing character designs immediately tell you what their role is in the story and grab your attention even before they act or say a word of dialogue. For the most part I tend to respect the original designs of the characters people ask me to draw... it almost feels wrong to take a design that somebody else has worked hard to develop and then alter it for some other presentation. That's kind of how I feel about this picture. The original characters are all quadrupeds without too much in the way of human gender identification beyond the head structure stylization, and for better or worse that's what I chose to stick with in this picture. I'm kind of torn now because I like the end result, but I also think I could have made it look better if I'd given them greater sex appeal that they didn't originally have.