Today we're drawing Flans from the Final Fantasy series. They are essentially the slimes of Final Fantasy and are flubbery like the actual flans that people eat. Here is a better description of them from the Final Fantasy Wiki. If you need visual reference of what they are, here are a few examples of what they can look like.

Ok so now you know a bit about them and what they look like so we can get started.

Step 1 - Sketch 

They have round heads and the base of them is spread out a bit to look smudged as you can see in the images above. They also generally have slobbery mouths  We need to incorporate that into our sketches.

Step 2 - Rough Shade

In this step, we don't need to get the shading perfect but we at least need to define our light sources. This should give the flan features some form, especially for  the smudgy smears at the bottom. 

Step 3 - Reflection

This step is a bit similar to the previous step, but just taking it to the next level. These creatures are wet and slimy so they need to appear like it. You'll need to pick very bright colors here and show the light source within the reflection. This step can be tricky trying to understand how reflections work so don't beat yourself up. Even for me, drawing reflections takes a bit of trial and error still but eventually I come up with something good enough.

Step 4 - Polish

Once you're done shining your sprites, it's time to make sure your sprites have a nice silhouette and don't have any sketch pixels left over. Also double check your reference to see if any important features are missing. For example, I forgot to give the blue one arms! In this stage, you can tweak colors as well. Sometimes the sprite doesn't have enough hue shifting or saturation but those things add so much in the polish stage so make sure you at least try toying with the colors, you might be surprised. The polishing stage can be the most time consuming because it's all about cleaning up and getting in all the final small details, but for me it usually the most fun! So here are the sprites I'm satisfied with. I'd love to draw the Royal Ripeness boss version someday and teach it to you all. But for now that covers this tutorial.