Basan, the Giant Fire-Breathing Chicken (of Doom)

Another entry for Anime Boston's youkai art contest (described here).

Right. So all of my previous entries have been pretty serious (and universally dark, more or less). I needed a light-hearted break. So I did Basan.

The short of it: Basan is described as a giant fire-breathing chicken who lives in bamboo groves (don't worry, his fire is cold and doesn't burn anything).

Why did I decide to do this one? Because my gaming group's current Pathfinder campaign, I have a gnome summoner whose eidolon (main summon monster) is a human-sized chicken she can ride on. As soon as she's a high-enough level, the chicken is going to get fire-breathing. So I read Basan's description and went, "Hey, wait! That's Boo!" and just had to draw him.

I spent a lot of time at AAC doodling out various youkai ideas. I may have to scan them and post them in my scraps sometime soon, because I rather like a lot of the tiny doodles. I jokingly doodled out this picture of Basan, and decided that for such a silly-sounding monster, I had to use an equally silly-looking picture. I scanned the tiny thumbnail, printed it about 4x the size in light red, inked it, and scanned it back in for coloring. Went with a flat style that uses textures rather than shading to make it interesting, and voila. Giant flaming chicken of doom.

TD: pencil and ink on paper, Illustrator for lines, Photoshop for colors and textures.