#axehandle dog

A little study into the teeth of the axehandle hound. It’s a fearsome critter, a plague upon lumberjacks that specifically only eats the wooden handles of axes. The original description of them gives them an axe-shaped snout. Which got me thinking of the proposals for Smilodon lips. Thus here we have the axehandle hound hiding two rodent-like incisors for chewing and breaking apart its wooden delicacies. Behind them they have inner teeth adapted for grinding, but are still noticeably canine. Their incisors also have high iron content like some rodents but don’t grow throughout their lives.

Originally this was just black and white, but I wanted to try my hand at coloring it. One thing most people tend to miss out on when drawing them is that, while compared to a dachshund, they’re wild dogs. So I wanted to make it look more like a coyote than a beagle. Unfortunately… coyote fur is really hard to draw. Wolves as well. They’ve got this really complex fur where there are individual strands of hair colored differently right next to each other. Which is super time-consuming to draw. I tried my best to render it without straying too far from the line-art style, but it still doesn’t look nearly as good. Oh well. For one of the TDG stories, an axehandle hound plays a central role. If only I’d get around to writing it.