[Comm | WIP] El Alebrije

Final product post 

Commission done for a personal friend of mine.

Meet the Alebrije, an imaginary creature which came from the Mexican culture. The Alebrije is basically a mixture of several animals  concocted into a colorful and overall fantastic sight that one would expect to see in a fever dream.
In fact, according to the Wikipedia, the concept of Alebrijes came from a dream called Pedro Linares Lopez, an artist who used to have some sort of condition that made him go unconscious at around 30 years old, during some of the dreams he had in that state he said to have met these creatures, who would constantly chant their names.


And yeah they're the vibrant colorful animals you see in Coco from Disney.

• 1- Early rough sketch 1: During the earliest stages we needed to do some brainstorming because the idea for the posing and the overall build of the creature was still not fully set on stone. The prompt I was given was to make a creature mixing features from a bear, a dolphin, a leopard and an ant.
  In this iteration the torso was bear, the limbs were leopards, the tail and fin was dolphin, and an ants head.
• 2- Early rough sketch 2: This 2nd iteration was dolphin head, ant torso, bear legs and a leopard tail. Needless to say this one caused a lot of laughter and also a lot of creeps.
• 3- Early rough sketch 3: My personal favorite, a perspective shot featuring a leopard head with ant features, upper bear torso and lower leopard legs along with a dolphin tail.
• 4- Early rough sketch 4: This last one was a bear upper torso and head with a dolphin lower body, it was done a little after we already decided on a sketch so I never finished it, and instead just put whatever.
• 5- Early rough sketch 5: We decided to go with the 1st sketch, so now we were supposed to decide the posing. This one is from below.
• 6- Early rough sketch 6: And this pose is from behind.
• 7- Final sketch: After a lot of thought, we decided to redraw the 1st sketch again with better proportions.
• 8- Lineart: WIth the sketch done I went ahead and added the clean colored lineart.
• 9- Flat colors: Then came the flat colors separating each bodypart
• 10- Color patterns: Next came a very tedious part where I created a couple patterns and then distorted them to fit the limbs like a 3D models.
• 11- Color tweaks: Next I tried to merge the colors a little so everything's much more organic.
• 12- Final corrections: Last but not least I put even more tweaks removing the seams and also corrected several colors and added a couple effects!