Lycanthropy Illustration Process

This one was pretty experimental! Though it still stayed in my general comfort zone of how I do illustrations, it went in a lot of different directions I didn't expect. The first sketch in the middle was just a concept I scribbled down, and the one at lowered opacity is something I did later after deciding I wanted to make it into a more dynamic piece. I first did the lineart for the middle drawing and wasn't sure what to do with it, I took a lot of breaks from it just trying to decide what I even wanted to accomplish. I ended up just doing kind of random crap haha, I put some more Leos in the background and some moon symbolism (it's supposed to be the main three's pupils!), really just trying to find something that looked cool. The blood was where I really began having fun with it, that's definitely where it all started coming together.

 I played with the top left Leo's expression and eye a bit, wondering if I should give him the target eyes or just the regular yellow iris--I felt that the former competed with the one in the middle, so I opted for the latter. I also scrapped the yellow background for the same reason, plus the white fit in with the lore better anyway. After applying blend modes it still felt incomplete, so just to jot down ideas I drew some wolf teeth and ended up really liking that first sketch. Blew it up big and colored it yellow, and it ended up framing the piece in a way I was really happy with. The coloring is super sketchy but pretty purposeful, at this point I don't even try to make anything super clean unless it's particularly important to do so lol. The real interesting part though was the last minute inclusion of the rest of that teeth sketch, I basically just did it as an afterthought because the initial finished piece didn't fit on Instagram! It was annoying at first but it ended up making me like the piece all the more, and from there it was just coloring in the sketch super quick and blending things to hide the hard edges of the canvas. Did that pretty much on one layer so not much process there. Overall this piece was quite strange to figure out but I like how it turned out a lot! It's basically just a collage of various standalone drawings bashed together, kind of surprised it worked out so well 😁