Gijinka Kirby & Bandanna Waddle Dee

I think every year I redesign my gijinka designs for Kirby & friends (except last year, where I didn't really draw anything of them at all). So here are this year's designs for Kirby and Bandanna Waddle Dee. I would prefer not to post the old versions because I think they're really... bad... but I can describe them for you! Actually, Bandanna hasn't changed much at all from his 2019 design! I just made him shorter and gave him a face mask as a reference to how Waddle Dees don't have mouths. Kirby on the other hand, was massively overhauled. I used to have this problem where any time I'd draw him as a human, he'd look too much like Steven from Steven Universe. I mean, I gave him a star shirt & everything (it was supposed to look like Popstar, his home planet). I tried to fix it in 2019 but I still kept the shirt because I wanted to hang onto it for some reason? But that's been thrown out now. I like the simple jumpsuit I drew for him here, it's puffy just like he is! I think this Kirby design is perfect, it's just how I wanted him to be! Plus, the new design is more gender neutral as well (Kirby is genderless in Japan, after all).
I originally started work on this piece when it was Return To Dreamland's anniversary, but I had quite a few other projects on my queue. Well, better late than never! Total drawing time for this piece was 4 hours, 34 minutes, over 3 days. (not counting all the downtime where I was working on other projects, of course.)

Kirby belongs to Nintendo and HAL Laboratory.