Werewolf Anniversary

Back in Spring I got contacted by an old, familiar company.  It was White Wolf Games.  My first true freelancing gig was with White Wolf just before I graduated from CCAD in 1995.  I then proceeded to spend the better part of the next six years being a work horse for the horror-based RPG company - illustrating for nearly all their World of Darkness properties: Vampire, Changeling, Hunter, Mage, and most notably Werewolf: The Apocalypse.  Indeed, much of who I am as an artist I can attribute to my years drawing and inking hundreds and hundreds of were-animals of all shapes and sizes and of all cultures and character.

The more I inked illustrations for White Wolf, the better I became - becoming a student of how Mike Mignola composed his images with line and large shapes of moody black.  Mignola's love of mythology and mythological paraphernalia and design motifs seeped into my own bones as I was called upon to develop the looks of each werewolf tribe (which were often tied to geography-specific history and mythology).  This attention to design and antiquities from ancient cultures still heavily persists in my artwork today.

And of course, I developed a pretty good ability to take pretty much any animal and anthropomorphize it - a skill incredibly useful in pretty much any fantasy game I have worked on since then.  Being able to draw a snarling, slavering predatory mammal head is something I barely go a week without having to do in some form or another.

But it's been a while - I can't remember the last Werewolf project I worked on, nor when that was.  It was probably around 2002 shortly after they restarted all their properties - which was shortly after they ended the previous epoch with "the Apocalypse".  Which was ok by me.  I felt that I had put my fingerprints all over their brand - with the new brand starting, maybe it was time for a new anthropomorphized-creature artist to step in.  Plus I was starting to do more and more color work and there just wasn't enough of that to go around with the mostly black-n-white books for White Wolf.  Since then, the only White Wolf project I have worked on was one short gig doing a slew of Changeling full-figure spot illos.

But then I get this e-mail from Rich Thomas (who seems to have been at White Wolf as long as anyone) saying that they are working on a 20th anniversary Werewolf: The Apocalypse book and that they'd like for me to do full-color figures for each of the 13 classic Werewolf tribes plus the 3 "lost" tribes.  The chance to go revisit those old lycanthrope friends, well, I just couldn't pass it up.  White Wolf helped me pay my bills for a long time. The art directors allowed me room to learn on-the-job and to experiment with all sorts of different b/w techniques - some of it worked well, some did not.  And sometimes my art strayed too far into being cartoony.  But generally I'd like to think I gave them some nice artwork over a great many books.  So putting my Werewolf:TA boots on again, was not only sweetly nostalgic and still comfortable, but also a pleasure.

Pictured in this post are a selection of my cleaner drawings of the 16 illustrations I did for the 20th Anniversary issue.  Enjoy!

Innistrad Concept Drawings pt2

One last post of Innistrad stuff.  Wish I had more (since I probably did at least 50 more drawings for this concept push) but currently, this is all I have in my possession to show.  These here are my werewolf designs.  There isn't a whole lot left to do with werewolves unless you want to get really wacky.  For Innistrad though, werewolves had to remain within a classic look.  So I took a werewolf I might draw for White Wolf's Werewolf:the Apocalypse game but hyper exaggerated the proportions.  Instead of sleek and super-muscles all over, these werewolves have smaller heads, elongated arms, tiny waists and hind legs, and smaller thumbs higher up on the wrist than a human hand (right about the middle between a human hand and a canine front paw).  Females are more svelte of shoulder and chest. Thought they came out pretty cool.

Wolves in Innistrad are separate from the werewolves and thus did not have to look similar.  I threw out a bunch of little thumbnail to see what caught the eye of the design team.  the one that worked best was the hairless-muzzled one at the bottom. I tried to picture a classically "horror" version of a wolf and seemed to recall seeing an old old artist representation of a wolf attacking somebody and the wolf was truly monstrous (not the elegant, primal beauties they are in the real world).  The wolf in the picture had no fur on its face and exaggerated teeth.  So I kinda rolled with that: bare, bulkier muzzle brimming with long teeth, and a nose that was more like a weird bear than a canine.

Here's another take on what humans might wear to battle in Innistrad.  Black iron being the metal most often used, I applied bits and pieces of spiked iron armor to their otherwise leather and cloth outfits.  Gotta protect the neck from those damn vampires (thus the high collars!)

Well, that closes the book on the Innistrad stuff I currently have access to.  One day I'll have the rest of the work I did on this concept design project and I'll post some more.  For now though, I next will move on to posting some Return to Ravnica sketches - and then another "Guess the Album Cover" contest!  Stay tuned......