After taking home two double-yous with the last two designs, I invest even more effort into today's Zvery. (I have taken compliments as the indicator for a W--they got called cute, which was the intention.) I don't know why the gif is screwing up, but here's Shardoon:

I'll go a bit more in depth today. 

I have incorporated ChatGPT into my process, of course. It really just makes the initial research fun and dynamic. I decided on a type (crystal) looked at the card I wanted to create a creature for, and abstracted its trait as: "what's an individual animal that can damage two or more animals at once." I got a list in which the Australian Stonefish was mentioned. Looking at the fish it might as well be a crystal, but more importantly, it has so much personality without even adding anything to it, so I quickly settled on that one. Then I asked ChatGPT about the detailed anatomy of this fish where it mentioned, among other things, that it has 13 spinal spikes that contain its poison. So obviously this was what would become the crystal theme of the creature: crystal spikes. 

So then I did some thumbnails to figure out framing and pose and all the things I know really little about. I was deciding between top-down vs bottom-up perspective on the Zvery, but I decided to go with this view for two reasons. From above it would have looked like a diamond shape, which would have been cool, but the spikes would be hard to recognize. And since I did want it to be true to source with the camouflage aspect, it would have been hard to spot in that view. The bottom-up view allowed me to make it into a triangular shape, which they tell me looks more threatening, while also allowing me to hint at the camouflaging ability of the fish. I placed some sand at the bottom which is the same color as the fish and tried to make the crystals look transparent. I think it worked. The hardest parts were definitely the perspective and the surface of the water from below. It kept turning out like cloud until I figured it out. I didn't put too much time into that though.