Forest Guardian (ideation sketch)

I knew I wanted to do a creature, Guardian of the forest. But I started being kinda lost on what direction I would like to pursue.

So I started with just few keywords and line drawing and was quickly stuck on how to proceed. Then I switched to just drawing out all kinds of plants silhouettes and then set up few keywords to apply on those silhouettes. I have never used this silhouettes method traditionally before so it took me a while to get used to it and found that using a lighter copic marker seems to be a better choice so I can sketch on top of it.

In the last three pages I took some of the earlier silhouettes and try to flesh out more on the ideas. In page 6 I thought could be fun to try to make the forest guardian more golem/summon like so I started to put in some humanoid elements and knight like elements.

Also tried to flesh out my immovable creature idea and halfway I thought hey maybe it could be spider instead which brought me to more ideation in page 8. In page 7 I was trying to explore in the other direction of the guardian being creatures instead of golem. Though it would be quite an aggresive creature who can charge at the opponent thus I gave them tusk/horns/etc.

In page 8 I develop more on the spiders idea and started to play around with the limbs and thought could be cool if it has markings that could help to make it looks more intimidating to the opponents, like moth. Also gave it some spikes which could deal status damages to the opponent.

I have always been quite terrible and design and really hope to be able to learn more about it.