Two happy Nido cooks, Arnie and Nidorina, who enjoy making food. The big difference is that Arnie does this for a living and tends towards making gourmet meats or otherwise fancy stuff. I designed the characters based off these ideas: Arnie = short and squat, and Nidorina = “child bearing cartoon mother”. Additionally, Nidoran male has a lot of points, so I sort of built him off of diamonds and sharp edges. Nidorina contrasts by having more curves, circles and rounded edges. The very first idea was more exaggerated and more rigid with shapes, but I wanted the characters to still look recognizable and not take it too far where they become an overstylized generic rabbit and some koala-mouse-rabbit (specifically aimed at Mrs. Nidorina) looking thing. I'd say the characters don't actually look like this (well, Arnie doesn't really).

You can view the rough version of this illustration here, and an overlay of the rough on top of the final here.