Hello Steem peeps and fellow artists,
In the spirit of Halloween that is around the corner, I wanted to share with you a character that has been looming in my mind for a while - that I was finally able to spend some time this week sketching and developing.
I find that storytelling helps me visualize the character's appearance, but once the character emerges through graphite on paper, it takes over the story and can go much further than the initial idea...
Gale
The female Lycanthrope (werewolf)
Gale is a Lycan of a very rare kind... She doesn't have a human form.
She cannot escape her animal self to live with humans, and she is also an outcast among her own kind and other creatures of darkness as she is so different from them. So naturally she is a wild-child, unsocialized and accustomed to solitude... though she is not quite alone...
At this point, I had a very faint notion of how Gale should look, but I know the personality and the kind of body language that she exhibits. So I started with some rough gestures using a pen and then pencil:
Though she appears feral, Gale has a master to whom she is a loyal and protective, despite his distance and neglect towards her because of her odd characteristics as a werewolf. Most of her days she spends dwelling in the woods on her own, like a pale ghost in the white of the winter forest, satisfying her curiosity and learning from nature. She preys on deer, rabbits and anything injured - wintertime causes her to be slightly undernourished. But the human remains that her master leaves for her, she discards in the forest without eating...
I tried portray her as a monster and the animal that she is, but also in balance with her effeminate face, expressive eyes and a dash of attractive. This has been a challenge to draw, and I'm still not sold on any of my attempts here.
Her figure is tall and slender, with an arched back or a hump that is commonly attributed to werewolves, but due to her lighter bone structure and smaller frame she is more flexible and less brutish than other Lycanthropes. Her arms are long and muscular - allowing her to walk on all four; her hands are large and strong, and her long fingers end with razor sharp claws.
Though smaller than a typical werewolf, she can still appear rather menacing. And although her master doesn't expect much of her, she is eager to protect him, despite him being almost as strong as her.
Here I drew her a little more muscular than I intended, but at the same time, succeeded in capturing her ability to be a threat. The image on the left is the initial sketch, and then the one to the right is after a short battle that took place between my pencil and eraser.
So this was the last sketch I had done before making this post (below). There is something cat-like in this version of Gale that I will keep tweaking, but otherwise i'm happy with the results. I was initially going to color her as an albino but then ended-up making her more like the Arctic or the Tundra Wolf - with a pale coat and amber eyes.
But there is much more to Gale than what is being said here, and then what Gale knows about herself... So stay tuned for more backstory and illustrations that will be coming shortly.
Meanwhile, I hope you find this interesting... intriguing... and all that :)
Thank you all for reading.
