The closest thing to a friend.

Draven was the closest thing Lycurgus had to a friend, and for this he was eternally grateful.

For the first several chapters of Fair Game, Lycurgus is far too small and weak to survive on his own. He ends up tagging along with a small pack of werewolves for food and protection, but doesn't get a lot of either. The only person who treats him with anything even remotely resembling kindness is Draven, a more survivable werewolf who does his best to look after him. Draven, though nowhere near being the strongest in the pack, is ambitious, cunning, and a competent fighter: he's one of only a very few werewolves to survive a battle with Grosvenor, though it leaves him somewhat disfigured.

Trying a couple of new things here. Mostly, I wanted to see how well I could cope with two characters in the same image. Not well, it seems: despite planning it out pretty thoroughly, I realised early on that Draven's hand was way off. Trying to fix that (which I consider to be a partial success), I screwed up the position of it. It was supposed to be a hair-ruffling sort of thing, but now the hand is just sort of floating there.

The other thing I wanted to try was a more "traditional" digital technique. This was all done with a single pixel brush set to 100% opacity with no pressure sensitivity. I tried to do much the same sort of thing I would have done with a fineliner. The main difference is that normally I would use detail as shading. For example, I would normally fill in fur only when it's in shadow, and leave the rest blank. For some reason, that just didn't seem to work here. Instead, I've tried to use detail for highlights.

The new light/detail method is a little odd, but I quite like the way it looks. It's hardly realistic, but I think it might be nice to use for illustrations and such (it reminds me of prints in old books). It's also much, much, much faster than doing full colour/shading, which takes me inordinate amounts of time.

Any feedback on this would be pretty helpful. I started off trying to include actual detail, but it seemed to get lost or end up in the wrong place. In contrast, just scribbling in texture looks ok at a distance, but isn't exactly elegant on closer inspection.