Character Concepts

I really don't like the litter that used to be all over the roadsides around my old house.  Apart from being bad for the environment it is also unsightly.  So the character I am attempting to design is a sort of spirit for the road side.  The idea came from the movie Spirited Away where the river spirit comes in and is a big blob of mud.  He then gets trashed removed from his body then his true form appears.

With my idea for the roadside I had a look at spirits of Maori culture, namely taniwha which can look like tuatara, and tried to that in my design.  So the first concept was a lizard looking one with grass fur and roadside reflectors as spines.  This could look cool but I felt like lizards don't fit with the roadside feel, so I investigated another animal as a spirit animal, the rat.  

Here are some quick sketches of rat heads I did trying to make it look as friendly as possible and a first drawing.

Next step is to make a design of the rat spirit in the messy state.  I want this to be ugly, disgusting and sickly, this is to show how throwing litter to the road side is not a good thing.