Wilfrith and Grwn - Roughs - Pages 26-27 (Patreon)

I’ve had guests staying at my house for the recent solar eclipse, so I’ve been kind of slow on the drawing of the rough pages. And in addition to that this one gave me a lot of guff. I had a largely finished second half to the second page that I just painted white over and drew on top of palimpsestically to get here. You can see all sorts of resized raster line fuzz and lines that awkwardly meet and connect with mismatched lines and such. But in the end, I was happy with the composition I got. And also how topically moon-relevant the pages were.

(Pages 26-27, digital roughs from Wilfrith and Grwn)

Since they’re werewolves, I thought it would be fun for the world to have a complex system of way too many moons affecting all sorts of elements of their internal drives. I ended up with a rough count of 37 moons of varying colors that affect all magical and magical-adjacent creatures differently. I’m still workshopping their aesthetic and I’m sure it’ll be kind of vibes-based most of the time. You could see them in the beginning of Wilfrith and the Golem Stonemason, too.

I had written in the script about some “shears that seem to imply an origin” which is a great thing to write in prose because it makes the reader’s imagination do your work. But in a script, you reach it and it’s just great thanks me, now I have to make a concept and execute it visually. I think I need to make these a little more gothic—spindly, lacelike. Really lean into the thorns. But this is the roughs, so that is good enough. Then I went and added a designed razor blade thing and gosh Jon you know that was not in the script alas. Gotta have set right?

I had a design for Wilfrith that I thought was going to be the endpoint of this haircut:

(Digital illustration, design for Wilfrith and Grwn)

So I was intending to go with that, but it kind of seemed to easy and instantaneous of a transformation. A story about werewolves should be about transformation. So it’ll be the hairstyle—one more like himself in the present—that Wilfrith grows into. I also drew him there and thought he was way too cute, so I think I hit the right target. Finding my footing with Grwn, too.