A client that found me through the art I've done for The Dresden Files fandom over the last few years contacted me recently about commissioning an illustration of his son's D&D character. Described to me as a "werewolf made of blood, with glowing orange eyes and a sort of venomous green running from his claws up to his forearms." Outside of that, and a few reference photos showcases the desired viscosity, I got to tackle it any way I wanted to. Firstly, I had to come up with the composition, which was harder than expected. I actually wound up doing about five or six roughs before I though about how this process might make a good post, so unfortunately those weren't saved before I started over. Below are the last three I did before settling on the final.
Once I landed on the final, I went through and inked just the werewolf itself. I kept the linework really minimal, as I figured too much linework would obscure the idea that it was made out of blood. I used dark red for the linework for the same reason.
Once that was sorted, I dropped out the sketch layer. Using the gouache brush in Procreate I rendered the wolf using two shades of red, and then an almost white highlight. I had also forgotten that the blood wolf was supposed to have six large black quills coming out of its back. I also laid down a green overlay layer on the hands.
Once I was reasonably happy with how the blood wolf was looking, I dropped in the background. This started with just filling a layer behind the blood wolf with green, and blending in some bright green and yellow. Dropping the background trees was basically accomplished using a slightly darker green than the background. The trees directly behind the blood wolf were done in a dark brown instead of a black, because I didn't want them to draw attention from the wolf. I still treated them as silhouettes, adding highlights where it was helpful.
Now that the background was in, it was time to do a final pass on the rendering of the wolf. Darkened up the contrast a bit, added a cast shadow to imply trees in front of the blood wolf as well. I also expanded and finished up the green on the claws.
And that's the final. The end result kind of reminds me of a Goosebumps cover, which I'm not at all upset about.
