Creature Design - Maned Werewolf and Terryl Whitlatch

Creature Design #3

Overview

The creature is based on a small brush-pen silhouette of a werewolf with thick neck fur and a hunched posture. I instantly liked it and knew I wanted to use that as the final pose, so it was useful for this artist's process (instead of wasting time figuring out a pose after the design).

Terryl Whitlatch is author to several creature design books, and comes from a background of animal anatomy. She's exceptional for creating realistic creatures, complete with bones and underlying muscle structure. It's not something I had attempted with a creature design.

Research

• Terryl Whitlatch's book, "Animals: Real and Imagined". She does have other books but I don't currently own them.
• Human, dog, wolf and bear anatomical images on Google Images.

Process

Over a low opacity layer with the silhouette on it, I drew a skeleton with a lot of referencing to anatomical images. I wanted to be sure the structure was correct for how I envisioned the end creature, thus it has an overly long neck, a hunched spine, and is an amalgamation of human and wolf bones. The bear skull worked better overall for the strong jaw and square muzzle, making sure it's stronger than an average wolf creature.

Breaking the creature down to its bone structure made me think a lot more about how its parts should match together (i.e. the human arms and the wolf chest). It was a very interesting task, though highly time-consuming.

Musculature is not something I have really studied - this part of the process was very tedious and required a lot of references. I typically learn where muscles are by studying the actual creature in various poses - this was a long and boring technique for me, though probably beneficial.

The final creature. His size isn't really well displayed in the simple background, but I do like the different colours and shades of his fur.

I tried to keep a limited colour palette, though the final effect seems to be of age - a wary, old werewolf, streaked with grey, decked in the wings of crows to enhance the stature and rank his thick mane already gives him. His gait would be careful, clever, and silent, as would his attacks, though he might be weaker than smaller, younger werewolf enemies.

Reflection

• Very time-consuming process
• Requires a solid pose/idea from the start
• Still don't know which way to design it from - bones, muscles, body, or vice versa. Bones and muscle first give a solid foundation to draw on, but body first gives the final design and pose
• Useful for learning underlying structure - useless if sped through/guessed
• Probably not useful for typical design approaches unless anatomy is already known