Wolf

For practice, I decided to draw one of my wolf characters howling. I thought some of you might want to see how I did it. Since I only saved the final product, all but the first image are layers of the final result. This is why you can't see what I changed part way through the drawing.
Night scenes are much easier than normal drawings since they're dark enough very little shading is needed.
I started with a basic sketch done on paper. I only used a little reference for the wolf's head.

Next, I made a basic sky for the back ground. It was pretty easy to do since I used the gradient tool on Photoshop.

I used my lineart to do a silhouette of a wolf with a slightly darker color than the sky. (You can't see it since this is only some layers of the final result and I deleted the lineart layer.) When I first did it, it was more like the drawing but I used copy and paste to turn the head so it had a shorter neck. I also changed the mouth a little so it looked better.

Here, I added the light from the moon. It's a lot easier than it looks. For the highlights, I chose a color that was lighter than the sky. I also added some stars.

I decided the rock's highlights made things too bright so I put a darker color over the rock to darken it. I also added the darker spots on the moon. I flipped the picture around because I realized my wolf had the wrong ear torn. That might have messed up my moon a little and it's now backwards. (I had to look at a few real moon pictures to do the moon.)

I used Photoshop CS4 and a Wacom Bamboo fun drawing tablet. If you want to experiment with digital art, you can download a free program called GIMP, which I used before I got Photoshop.

Jessi