I make no apologies for sheep.
Though there's a difference between style and knowledge (or ability), and the former usually develops from the latter. I don't think Watchful I is trying to match the look of a popular kid's show.
Just talking about the two pieces shown here: firstly I'll say that the Napoleon Dynamite reference was a bit cruel. These are nowhere near that bad, and not really bad at all. The terracotta soldiers are good, but I wonder how much that comes from close examination of photos of the RL terracotta army.
No such luxury for dragons, outside the highly stylised traditional paintings! (and like I say, I don't think Watchful I is going for much stylisation) Without wanting to come across as too scathing, the dragon looks like an awful lot of dragons that I've seen before: limbs that just kinda-sorta issue out of a tube body, a michelin-man underbelly, and net-textured back. (though arguably Chinese dragons have a stronger claim on the latter two feature, based on said old paintings and representations) Concentrating on the forelimbs, looks like there's some understanding of muscles, deltoids and brachioradialis especially, but also a bit of winging it, fudging a general shape and representation of an arm. You can get away with that in a 2D drawing, and even in a 3D sculpt to some extent, but much less so. I also think there's a bit of uncertainty about the humanoid hands and how they work and flex and grasp, especially the thumbs. Even the little human perched in front here looks like there's a lack of surety about how he's put together.
Not to mention that's another thing I see in a lot of dragon art: humanoid arms - particularly humanoid deltoids (shoulder muscles) - on nonhumanoid, even quadrupedal, creatures. Here the deltoids are nowhere near as bad as some great, bulging, Arnold-Schwarzenegger pumpkins I've seen on some dragon designs, but still a little confusion about how they attach to and wrap around a human torso, which is excarbated by applying them to nonhumanoids. If there's one thing I'd try to drum into every beginning creature designer at the start, it's that animal deltoids and shoulders in general are quite different to human examples!
But, I realise that this isn't the finished product, and I don't know how many hands the concept will go through before it reaches that stage. I'll wait to see how it turns out.
