Werewolf Hunting

This illustration started mid-way through the artbook, drawn from comments by a tutor about subverting mythical animals, "such as a unicorn fighting a werewolf over prey". As my world featured unicorns, it was easy to slot my remade werewolf (from a previous semester) into the lore and have them come face to face. Although the unicorn looks ferocious, it is built to solely hunt werewolves and keep other denizens of the forest safe from their disease.

The image is built on the idea of a wildfire streaming across the tar pits and into the deep forest, driving all animals into close odds. The werewolf is a creature of spite and hate, attacking anything in its path, while the unicorn is an avenging god of the forest. The scene is intended to capture the sheer strength of the unicorn pushing its foe away, and the vicious, unnatural capacity of the werewolf to survive even when horrendously wounded.

It took an extremely long time to create. Built from a clay model (which was in itself modelled based on results from previous models of both creatures), the background was made first and then as the pose of the creatures changed, I was unwilling to change the background quite as much as I probably should. Figuring out how to turn the reference model into a fitting section of the image was difficult, and took a very long time; this image was dropped from the artbook in favour of finishing it afterwards without as much time constraint, allowing me to fully explore the possibilities of the image.

It is a new scene for me, a dynamic pose with a lot of strong, vivid lighting, silhouetting the animals against the skyline. I'm proud of what I managed to achieve with this image, as it pushed all of my skills and forced me to figure out responses to problems in the development that I didn't even expect to come up. The reference model became less of an exact thing, but was very useful for basic lighting and moving poses without worrying the perspective was wrong.

The final image was long, the same size as my three environments, as it was what I had learnt to make in the Jonas De Ro tutorial I took to heart, which kickstarted my interest in environments. For this project I wanted A5 results so I moved parts around into an A5 boundary. I think the longer image looks more dramatic but the A5 is better focused on the action of the piece, which is beneficial.