mary-masked

Werewolf (work in progress)

Published: February 26th 2020, 6:36:50 pm

I haven't really been thinking of painting as a form of self expression lately. Just the act of creating has been enough for me: Setting up challenges for myself, or experimenting with new techniques, or just making something that I think looks nice. 

Expressing emotion, especially one I happened to be feeling at the time, felt a bit too next level for right now (and not terribly helpful in getting an illustration career off the ground.) I've used painting to express emotion before but it was very hard to make something that I felt worked. Burlesque always seemed much easier in some ways because the song does a LOT the work for you.

But I've been dealing with some tough things recently and, on my way home, I started thinking about this piece.

I did this years ago during a particularly rough time and, while I like some of it, it never felt finished. The colored pencil just more sketchy than I wanted it to be, and something about the distance between the two figures didn't quite work. I thought about recreating it with pen and watercolor. But I bought this drawing tablet for a reason, dang it, and I need to practice with it.

I've also been wanting to push some more Ralph Steadman into my work, which seemed perfect for the rage I wanted this piece to have. Also working digitally means I can get as messy as I want without any fear of "ruining it." 

I started by moving the female figure and adding the wolf face.

Then I drew everything in the same sketchy style.

And then I played with some fancy photoshop brushes.

So now we're getting somewhere. It needs some cleaning up but I like the direction it's going in.

When I was taking screenshots for this post, I ended up with this combination of layers and really liked it!

Still not finished. It definitely needs a background. I want to bring back some of the fancy brush strokes and make the colors a bit more layered/varied. But I'm really happy with it so far.