Lantern Monkey

A project I started alongside Nicholas Kole's character design course on Domestika. Not my usual style of rendering but I really appreciate the clean style and flexibility of using layers and layer styles when designing.
The main thing I was initially inspired by for this project were the Nebuta Matsuri lantern floats in Aomori. I love how the light passes through paper lanterns and I wanted to incorporate that into the design. I tried to the reflect the shape language between his head and body and also by using the wave pattern throughout, there was this helmet idea that interacted with the silhouette of the character but I ended up scrapping that for what I think is a more effective overall design of the star shaped fur surrounding the face.

I plan to expand on this project with more characters and some prop/environment concepts.