Character Design - research

I was recently looking at the work of Michael Kutche, a German artist whos work we can see in things like "Thor" and "Alice In Wonderland". I looked at quite a few and i've noticed that he doesnt stick to one style, the looks of his work vary from really detailed 3D looking creatures to soft brush characters.

On this image we see a Woola concept, it's a lizard-like dog. When you read the description, the "lizard like dog" it sounds wrong because dogs are usually associated with these friendly looking fluffy animals but when you try and imagine a lizard, it doesn't put such a nice image in your head. But i must say that Michael did make it look really friendly, simply because he made it really fat and wrinkly which makes it look like a really lazy, barely moving thing... Also with it having a really friendly looking, smiling face, it's hard to look at it and not smile back! He used very soft colours to again to make it look more friendly. On it's back we can see some sort of spikes, but it'a not scary or intimidating when I look at it I think that maybe this is it's kind of fur.