So, in truth, I do NOT know what I’ll be doing with this art. This was something of an experiment I started just wanting to draw my three, primary lead characters of (L to R) Mariska, Claire, and Shondra.
I hadn’t done actual ink on paper in a WHILE and was just playing around since the novels will be prose with MAYBE inset art every now and again. This design isn’t meant to be a cover, as the tone isn’t quite right for the book as a whole, but it was a really fun piece to finish and maybe will be a print or promo poster or… Kickstarter reward eventually. I honestly don’t know.
The finished art was colored in both Adobe Photoshop and Clip Studio, so I could use some of the different brushes available and play around.
After scanning in the ink-on-paper linework, (Using a Pentel Style for the linework and Pentel Pocket Brush for Claire and Shondra’s hair) I decided that the fur details lacked the more fluid subtlety I’ve gotten used to inking digitally in Clip Studio, so I ended up digitally painting OVER those lines and then re-inking most of Claire over the top of the painterly colors. I’m much happier with how the lines look now.
I did the same thing, but to a lesser degree, for Mariska and Shondra.
Originally, the background was designed for all blue tones, but I started playing with gradients and layer blending modes back in photoshop and came up with the weird, pink, and gold glows. I have a real soft spot for over-saturated colors, and this was a fun way to play with that a little.
What is IS, though, is a way to showcase the ladies in my upcoming novel and another opportunity to draw a werewolf. So, it is its own reward.
So, last year I started an experiment by starting my weird little werewolf novel for NaNoWriMo. I finished that first novel, Lycanthropy and the Single Girl, in December of that year, after starting on the last week of October.
Now, a year later almost to the day, and I just finished the FOURTH book in what is now an ongoing series of novels. (It DOES have a title, but I’m not giving it up just yet. In the meantime, a sketch of the upcoming cover. lol )
That first book is 29 chapters and 102,499 words and is currently being edited for publishing, likely sometime early next year.
Book four has ended at 52 chapters and 235,738 words, making it the longest in the series so far. (I’m a wordy woman. lol) I am now going to dig into the editing and re-writing process from the beginning to give them all a good polish, but I am so impossibly excited to start really sharing these with everyone. I have put a lot of my heart and soul into these stories and I do hope that, eventually, you will all enjoy them.
In designing my werewolves for the series, I put together illustrations to help me visualize them. By and large, my decisions were to keep them largely humanoid rather than the more distorted, snout faces often seen in a lot of werewolf media.
This is for two main reasons, outside of just personal preference. One, I really want these books to lean into the idea that ACTUAL wolves are startlingly beautiful, and I want my werewolves to reflect that idea and not look like movie monsters. And two, my wolves don’t automatically lose their human minds and go feral, as is seen in so many films as well.
Again, in the wild, wolves aren’t just murder machines, so in my universe, why would werewolves be? Plus, if they don’t lose their human mental faculties in any way, then it behooves them to have faces that can still talk.
My wolves will absolutely have extended conversations while transformed, and that get’s tricky with long snouts. ;)
A little over three years ago, I started writing on a Star Trek fan sim with some friends. I was nervous as all heck to push out of my comfort zone and tell stories in prose instead of as a comic, but with a lot of help, I found my footing and my own voice as a writer.
We told a TON of stories with out characters on our made-up little ship, and I fell in love with writing just to write. I fell in love with setting the scene with words and making the characters breathe that way. I still love drawing, but in those little fan adventures, I discovered a different way to express myself I hadn’t before truly considered.
Of course, they WERE “Star Trek” stories, and I couldn’t really do anything with them. I had all these characters, themes and ideas I was going nuts with, and writing far more than the other writers were in the group, but they lived and died there, in a world I couldn’t really DO anything with. As such, after I had decided I was done with the sim, and we put the ship in proverbial drydock,
I sat on the ideas for a bit. Then, last October, a few different ideas met in the back alley of my mind and had a weird baby.
Now, to throw a flashback awkwardly into the middle of my story and confuse things even more, about 6 years ago, I was starting to get laser hair removal. See, I’m a transgender woman and that is kinda a big part of this story. As such, I was considering the frustration of the process and technical side of transitioning, along with the social issues and medical ones.
So, during all of that, an idea that had never found purchase in my life planted a seed. Why do werewolves in movies always grow all of that hair, and then it just… vanishes? How do they get their haircuts back after transforming? Seriously, how do well-cropped bangs just… come back after they were just a very large dog-creature?
All those questions suddenly had a new context in my mind as I was paying someone to shoot me in the face with science to get rid of my own “fur”, and that seed began to sprout. Just a tiny little idea about a woman trying to deal with life as a werewolf. I figured out little details like that, since hair is dead tissue, it wouldn’t just grow back in, so it would have to be shed. And hair would grow every time she transformed, ruining her haircuts.
They were details, but no story. So, jump back to the end of my experience writing Star Trek fan fiction. I had, in that time, created a bunch of Romulan characters, using the amazing “Rihannsu” novels of Diane Duane as the basis of how I managed the culture and language. I put my conflicted, emotionally torn little Romulan woman in Starfleet and used the stories to work through some of my own issues coming out as Trans by making her Romulan identity a metaphor. Her journey was one of self-acceptance between two cultures that did not always get along. I loved writing her stories, but they had ran their course.
Now, I still had these idea seeds for werewolves, but no story to frame them on. I also had a realized character torn between to cultures and two families, old and new. Eventually, I realized I could mush the two ideas together, and that I had already done a “first draft” of that story out in the Final Frontier. All I had to do was swap metaphors.
Now, these novels aren’t just re-writes of those stories, but the DNA of that is all in what I’m working on. Rihannsu culture inspired a secret world of werewolves with their own government and history. Alienation and self-acceptance traded green blood for fur and a tail. I had a road map to look at to inspire me to tell all new stories, and I was off to the races.
I’ve always loved werewolf stories, but never felt they told the angle I wanted to. Eventually, it took warping to Romulus and back to discover that what I needed to do, was tell my own story through the wolves. Hopefully, it’s a story you all will enjoy. :)
For the overwhelming majority of my life, I’ve been a cartoonist and a comic creator. I’ve been writing and drawing my own comics for decades now, and have loved telling stories that way. As such, it has raised a few eyebrows among my friends as to why I’m choosing to dive full-steam into prose novels instead of telling these stories as comics.
Part of this is just down to time. I have SOOO much I want to tel with these characters that would never be told if the medium was one where I had to draw it all. And, obviously, I still love drawing my new characters, like with these rough sketches of the protagonist, Claire Gribbald. But the reality is that if these were comics, and I had started drawing them when I started writing back in late October of 2020, then I would maybe be three or four issue into the story. In regards to where that would be in regards to the actual novel, I’m thinking somewhere around Chapter… 5 or 6?
There are, in total, 29 chapters in the first novel. There are 47 in the second book, 52 in the third, and as of writing THIS, 43 in the unfinished fourth book. So, that’s a BIG part of it. As novels, in a year, I’ve build up an entire world of characters and adventures that have yet to premier, but have happened for me.
These stories and characters needed to be novels, and it took me a while to trust that I could tell stories without pictures, but I am glad I’ve taken that step. Hopefully, others will like them as well.
And… I can still draw them whenever I feel like it, anyway. ;)
Part of a small art backlog from September. A girl with bleached blonde hair a large fake breasts gets bitten by a wolf while walking back to the sorority, now shes a bimbo werewolf.
