

The bottom right window is looking through my main camera, and this is the view at the start of the illustration. I always add extra views of my scene – the top right window is looking through a second camera with a scale value of -1 on the X axis, so that I could keep in mind how my piece looks mirrored – flipping your canvas is a helpful trick for drawing and I wanted to use that here! In fact, looking back, I added too much detail to the fur of the neck. I focus on big shapes, as detail will be drawn on top with grease pencil.

I used the snakehook tool and would hold shift to occasionally smooth out areas. My sculpting process is constantly changing, but for this piece all the meshes started as spheres and I sculpted using dynamic topology. So in addition to recreating this piece in 3D with grease pencil, I also used dozens of reference images to try to get a more realistic tree wolf. I’m still very proud of it, but since then I’ve studied animal anatomy a lot more closely and… well, let’s just say I can see how much I didn’t know at the time. I made this illustration at the start of 2019:

I have a long history of Red Riding Hood retellings – they’re all different, but for some reason they always involve a giant tree wolf.
