a character design for an independently published comic book i am doing with ~ cstuck called Heathen Sent [link]

so many people draw a Ki-Rin as a horse with scales, when I would think it was something very different. so I made a point of making it utterly UN-horse-like. The curved back, the face of a... not deer, gazelle, i guess... and the leaping rather than galloping gait. all the while trying to take ques from old oreintal descriptions of the creature. The art differed so much, especially for the face, being everything from a fierce dragon's face to a docile deer, i tried to base it on text based accounts. so, that's how i came to it. I basically just didn't want it to look like a plain old unicorn with scales. I wanted something distinctive.