Wilfrith and Grwn - Roughs - Pages 18-19 (Patreon)

I took a little gap here between page 18 and 19 because of life stuff, so you can see a bit of a seam between my process whims before and after. Rougher, structure based drawings on page 18, and more value-minded compositions on page 19. I think it works for the types of pages they’re meant to be.

(Pages 18-19, digital roughs from Wilfrith and Grwn)

This is where I had the (personal) breakthrough about how I wanted to render the white stars in Grwn’s fur. In retrospect, it’s such an obvious design element I don’t know why it was so elusive. In my conception of Grwn’s wolf form, it was supposed to be black with white spots like constellations or the starry sky, but even in replicating how that goes with dogs I kept coming up with messy looking design.

So finally resting on a heraldic representation of the ermine tincture, but in reverse colors makes a lot of sense for the setting and to tap into the already solved design knowledge of hundreds of years ago. The ermine pattern was popular for royalty all over Europe because it represented cloaks, coats, capes, and whatever they wanted made out of the white fur of ermines, with their tails as evenly-spaced black spots carefully dotting the attire. Replicating it with Grwn’s sloughed fur her gives Wilfrith’s improvised mantle a finished, regal look.

(Still at this point was really regretting not sparing any though for Wilfrith’s overgrown hair)

The next scene, which starts on page 19, was originally going to be two pages. I expanded it to three pages because I felt a travel montage is kind of awkward if it goes from right-hand page to left-hand page. It feels really incomplete to me not have a travel montage end with a page turn, so I sort of stretched it out and imagined more landscapes for them to travel through. Man of these are referenced from photos I took in various parts of Scotland, too.