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Description
Get this lineart for free! fav.me/dcqnmpw

Restarting my gallery with the old tried and true wolf!

I'm beginning my explorations of style as I spend the rest of this year figuring out how I'd want the art in my comics to look. I originally tried doing the colors soft, but all the markings were blending into each other too much and only would have looked right if I'd done some sort of fur shading. Besides, I like how graphic the markings look like this. I also tried stylizing the form of the wolf (angular shapes, tiny paws). I like it, but only time will tell if it sticks.

One thing I did that really worked well for me was filling the whole form of the wolf with my shading color, then erasing that away to show the light parts. Working the opposite way (adding shading to create shadows) never seems to work for me. I don't shade enough that way, so things look flat. But this was a fast method, and I like how it turned out.

No reference, so I'm sure the anatomy's a little wonky. But that's part of the whole point of this gallery restart- getting away from the crutch of reference. Reference is fine when it's just used as reference, but in the past I was essentially having to copy photos for things to look decent. That obviously won't work if I want to be an efficient comic artist, so bear with me as I figure out this whole drawing from imagination thing. I did have photos of wolves up on my other monitor while I worked though, just so I could remember what makes a wolf look like a wolf and not a German Shepherd.

Time: ~1 hr (but I wasted some time recoloring it when I changed my mind on how I wanted to approach it)
Program: Paint Tool Sai version 2 tech preview (which seems production ready to me)
Tools: Wacom Intuos 4

Description
Get this lineart for free! fav.me/dcqnmpw

Restarting my gallery with the old tried and true wolf!

I'm beginning my explorations of style as I spend the rest of this year figuring out how I'd want the art in my comics to look. I originally tried doing the colors soft, but all the markings were blending into each other too much and only would have looked right if I'd done some sort of fur shading. Besides, I like how graphic the markings look like this. I also tried stylizing the form of the wolf (angular shapes, tiny paws). I like it, but only time will tell if it sticks.

One thing I did that really worked well for me was filling the whole form of the wolf with my shading color, then erasing that away to show the light parts. Working the opposite way (adding shading to create shadows) never seems to work for me. I don't shade enough that way, so things look flat. But this was a fast method, and I like how it turned out.

No reference, so I'm sure the anatomy's a little wonky. But that's part of the whole point of this gallery restart- getting away from the crutch of reference. Reference is fine when it's just used as reference, but in the past I was essentially having to copy photos for things to look decent. That obviously won't work if I want to be an efficient comic artist, so bear with me as I figure out this whole drawing from imagination thing. I did have photos of wolves up on my other monitor while I worked though, just so I could remember what makes a wolf look like a wolf and not a German Shepherd.

Time: ~1 hr (but I wasted some time recoloring it when I changed my mind on how I wanted to approach it)
Program: Paint Tool Sai version 2 tech preview (which seems production ready to me)
Tools: Wacom Intuos 4