It's Lansaur!

I mentioned a few times in my post last week that the monster I had drawn, Kangolf, had a rival who was a dinosaur, as a nod to the Digimon cartoons.  Allow me to introduce you to that rival: Lansaur.

Much like how Kangolf was a bipedal wolf with kangaroo elements, Lansaur started with the idea to integrate rhinoceros elements into some bipedal dinosaur.  Eventually, I started to discard many of the rhinoceros elements until all that was left was the base idea for the creature: its bladelike horn.  This horn was where the term "Lansaur" came from, because it would use the horn to stab like a spear / lance.

In the place of the rhinoceros, I instead used an actual dinosaur: Styracosaurus, a large dinosaur similar in body structure to the more well-known Triceratops.  Due to its relative size to other creatures around it and its horns, I figured that you could cast a rhinoceros as the modern day Triceratops. I knew I wanted to add some kind of frill to its head in order to resemble a shield, but the spikier frill of Styracosaurus seems more intimidating to me than that of the Triceratops.

Part of the goal with this creature was to make its body look scary, like something you would not want to anger.  In most regards, this looks like a rather dangerous beast, with spikes and other sharp things jutting out from it, not to mention this creature's size.  But are the size, the sharp bits, and overall unapproachability really part of its character?  Here's a hint: do those look like the eyes of a relentless killer?

As for the coloring, originally, I was thinking of painting Lansaur a much stonier, duller greenish-gray to give a more general sense of "toughness".  Instead, I went with a much brighter shade of green.  As a giant lizard, I reasoned that a dinosaur would not generally like being in a cold environment, so I set this guy's home in a more tropical area, along with his general vulnerability to cold.  Brighter colors seem more common in more tropical areas (for example, see the monsters in Pokemon Emerald as opposed to the ones in older Pokemon games), so up went the saturation.  I chose green in particular to contrast him with the brown Kangolf.  Those two colors just look good together yet are not total opposites like orange vs blue, or green vs magenta are.