Feudal Japan Rodan Design

Here’s the 6th and final monster for the Fedual Japan War series. So most of you know that Rodan is my favorite monster in the Godzilla franchise of all time. I was really excited when I first heard he was confirmed to be in KOTM and doing my own take on Rodan for this series was a bit of a challenge.
Now for Feudal Japan Rodan’s design, I really loved the idea of him coming out of a volcanoe and being somewhat a volcanic monster, so I decided to borrow that design choice from KOTM and kept his fire wings. But in this series, Rodan is actually not an organic monster but a spirit monster of Mt. Fuji that took the form of a bird like monster made from volcanic rock, magma and lava. Rodan will only set himself on fire when feeling threatened or decides to fight. For some design changes, I did made Rodan’s neck slightly longer mainly because I was referencing birds that were native to Japan since Rodan is a Japanese monster. Example of those birds were cranes, cormorants, bustards and crested ibis. For his head design I took it a bit easy on the spikes, because he began to look to dragon like where it got to the point where he almost look like Syrax or Ghidorah. I mainly used the head of Final Wars and 1956 Rodan as inspiration for the head design since 1956 Rodan is still my favorite and I wanted to capture Rodan’s barbaric and terrifying nature for this series. So I gave him a slight smile expression on his face. I want to show Rodan in this series as an actual threat and terror, not some joke or punching bag for the other monsters. In this series Rodan will be a great challenge for Varan, Anguirus, especially for Mothra. Rodan will also be Godzilla’s loyalist and right hand man during the war and plays a significant role especially when facing against thousands of armies.