whitewolfburrow

Year of the Ox

Erasmus watched the lanky charr cub gather all the tools, place them where they belong, and meticulously fill all the troughs. The cub stomped around with way more force that was strictly necessary, ears drawn back, eyes pointed dead ahead.

The charr boy dropped his bucket next to a haystack. It fell over with a dull pang.

Legacy

Creating the tag list made me realize I never shared my first official (and commercial) shirt design. Made in 2019 for a FanForge spotlight on Aurene, Glint's scion and the Elder dragon of It's Complicated. It works off the idea of Aurene being still halfway between a hatchling and a full grown dragon, stuck between Kralkatorrik's shadow and the fresh and fragile Crystal Bloom.

The design...

[Pinned] Tags & Links

This post will help you navigate my otherwise confusing tagging and worrying amount of characters. It will not contain each and every tag I ever attach here, but it should allow you to find most of what you're looking for.

If you want an easy place to browse older posts and maybe chat about upcoming things, here's a link to our Discord server: 2021-02-03 19:42:41 +0000 UTC View Post

Preview of 2021

TL;DR: What is coming? More comics (three "franchises", so to speak), physical goods (Shirts designs, some minor trinkets and some printed things, patrons getting the first cut) and e-reader support. Principal themes of this year will be 2021-02-02 14:36:34 +0000 UTC View Post

Retrospect of 2020

So... hindsight is all twenty-twenty, right? (Yes, I'm absolutely sure nobody figured out that joke before me... /s) 

It was a rotten year, yeah. I can't pretend it was outside of my usual norm or that I've had it worse than the rest; that's simply not true. I'm also not going to give it the satisfaction in wallowing and reminiscing on all the shit and heartbreak and loss ...

December choice poll

After last months absence, there's a fresh batch of polls for you to decide where will I put my free time in the latter half of this month!

I cannot promise how much of that time will be, because on my hand, there'll be holidays, on the other, I'll have a bit of a change in my life (I promise to share more on that later) that'll eat a bit of my time as well.

Still, that doesn't mean...

DECEMBER '20 WIP: Various Winter Doodles

I haven't shared my progressworks for quite a while, so lets remedy that. I haven't really touched any more polished pieces, however, so I thought I'd offer you a glimpse at the earliest stage of my art process, which is "the noodly thumbnail that will haunt your nightmares till next Tuesday". (There's actually more than nine, but the rest take even me a few minutes to decipher.)

I'm not...

Sneak Peek - Hollow (a "werewolf" story)

"The smith": A worn-looking man of uncertain age.
His eyes are grey, dull and cold, almost lifeless, with just a tiny hint of green showing under the right angle. His features are tired, belying his actual age. Whoever would look at him couldn't help but notice broken nose and a long scar running horizontally across his left temple. It cuts through both his left eyebrow and left ea...

2020-11-13 22:13:18 +0000 UTC View Post

Character sketches! Whole bunch of them!

Where else do you find an otter, a charr, a miqo'te, a sabretooth, a fox and a 1760s English sailor?

So, as you may have noticed, there was no poll earlier this month; as my life got a bit turbulent at the moment, I decided to pour my time in November just into comics – both my own, making more progress on SF, Pirates and... one other thing (for which Patrons will get a sneak peek soon)...

Sneak Peek - Current project

I know I took my sweet time with it, but... yeah, this is the kind of work I do right now.

I finally located and/or replaced the source files for the original SF pages, and while some things were lost in The Big Drive Crash of 2018, I was able to rebuild things back into a presentable format.

And since then, I've been fixing little things here and there, working on the missing pages...

[Timelapse Video] Heyday

This comes pretty early, because it's one of the rare paintings I did in very limited number of sittings, making it easy to edit. 

Downside is, this thing kind of started out as a mindless sketch I was asked to work on during one of the official streams, so the start is not exactly captured with a timelapse in mind (thumbnail phase is missing and the first phase of the video's rather...

[Progresswork] Heyday

Since this piece happened across one official stream and three subsequent sessions (even if there were year-long breaks between phases), it's still fresh in memory and decently documented. The various checkpoints you can see above and read about below are a bit more segmented than usual, since the nature of the painting had me instinctively finish one part before moving onto the next, as it has...

October choice poll

Last month's poll was pretty fun to watch and while Firetwins winning it didn't exactly come as a surprise (I'm fairly aware of you, charr follower army) and I did spend a few hours hissing at having to paint water, fur and wet fur, it was in the end extremely rewarding.

And I even ended up finishing it,...

Heyday

Koruscar straightened back up and looked around. He found his brother still waist-deep, just a few feet from the shore, tail raised almost theatrically high to keep it dry. "Come on!" he yowled.

"Yeah, yeah," Kirruak grumbled in lieu of answer. "Just taking my time, that's --" He suddenly bolted a few inches sideways, glaring at something under his feet. 2020-10-01 18:34:23 +0000 UTC View Post

[Comic] Bloody But Unbowed

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

(Invictus, by W. E. He...

2020-09-21 01:07:09 +0000 UTC View Post

Calico (Unused promo concept)

Rummaging through my old files, I dug up a thing from a few years back, when I took part in a contest. The task was to create a pitch for a kid superhero, together with some concept/promo illustration.

From what I can remember off the top of my head, mine ended up being about a kid who ran away from home and met a strange girl who saved his life and gave him a magic necklace that could se...

September choice poll

So I've been giving some thought to how to make watching me more interactive than "sit in quiet and maybe the old dunce will cough up a painting every once in a while", and I think I came up with a solution which, I think, could benefit both sides.

Which is where this poll comes in.

You get to decide what would you like to see, and I get to move past my chronic tendency to flick bet...

[Making Of...] Sagefire: As Friends and Brothers

This is a bit of a first in a few aspects. 

Before we get any further, let me state the obvious: I did not do the art here.

The artist who did is Alassa, one of my dearest friends and a common collaborator. Her house was recently 2020-08-16 13:14:46 +0000 UTC View Post

Pride Project - WIP sketches

I don't usually commemorate or celebrate many things, but I decided to make a bit of an exception this year.

These four was a little something I started back in late May for various reasons. I feel a genuine love for these characters (and quite a few others, too), but there's still a lot of second-guessing myself around many of their stories. So putting these to paper (or... well, digital...

Bloody But Unbowed – In-Progress Preview

This comic... has been an adventure, to put it mildly. It was originally supposed to have different name, different pagecount, different character focus and different narration, but then Episode 4 happened and had me having to rewrite literally everything.

But I can yap your ears off on that when you see it done and I do a Making-Of post about it (which will this time include a very detai...

[Timelapse Video] Paladin

I was surprised to find that I recorded this. I remember wanting to stream that morning, but I was too tired and stressed out to be good company, so I ultimately just said "eh, whatever" and proceeded to turn my brain off to just sketch.

This is actually much slower than my usual timelapses. Those are generally a minute of video = hour of capture, but this one's so short that I actually h...

Big sister

Retweeting this piece under recent events, I realized I never actually shared it here. One of the things I consider the biggest fuckups of the opening issue of SF was how I failed to portray how big some of the characters are. In the setup I have, it's Norbert who seems abnormally short and pudgy in the company of normal people, while he's actually pretty average size surrounded by two tanks an...

[Progresswork] No Shadows Under Noonday Sun

Tennak's illustration is a bit of an odd beast. He's a surprise gift that's not really a surprise, consulted a lot with the "commissioner" and also created at a particular time during my ANet partnership. Due to both of those factors, the creation of this piece is pretty thoroughly documented.

Instead of making a tutorial for any sort of technique, I'll use it as a bit of a step-by-step o...

No Shadows Under Noonday Sun

No matter how fast or far you run; there's no shadows under noonday sun.  

Digging for the files related to the previous sketch, I realized I never actually posted this here.

So, remember these two brilliant pieces of charr engineering? They have a son. Seems that, somehow, combi...

Warriors' Tools

Art by me; Vesnia Goreheart, Tennak and the writing credit goes to Kreittis. 

This "that was supposed to be a loose sketch" is actually rather old. It's originally from about 2 years ago, but I was never really satisfied with it. I'm honestly still not, but Kreit deserves to get this public. 

My probabl...

Warmth

"Flame kills, Prisca. But it can also serve and provide warmth to those who know how to wield it."

A bit of a follow up to the last comic. Ever since Grothmar Valley launched early this year, I found my new favorite charr (well, two charr, but one is a bit of a steal on my side) in Efram. I just love the sweet irony of the former "females are tools" legion now being led by a male...

[Comic] Reason to Bend

Back when Icebrood Saga began, I met two my new favorite charr. One of them is Flame Legion "Imperator" (quotes included) Efram Greetsglory, the other is the charr shaman leading Ash Legion meta event in Grothmar Valley, a young fire elementalist called Brightblaze. While I may have stolen the latter for mostly silly headcanons (he is not officially named Nero...), the former has a story that g...

MAY '20 WIP: Bold Old Charr

I ended up doing two streams for ArenaNet in short timespan, resulting in finally moving ahead (well, as much as you can in a two-hour margin) with two old in-progress paintings of two old charr.

Morhault's revenant invasion / red hot chilli peppers for lunch, dinner and midnight snack is kind of inching towards finished state at this point. I'm really happy with the colors, still on the ...

Paladin

 My good blade carves the casques of men,
   My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
   Because my heart is pure. 

(Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Sir Galahad)

I needed to turn my brain off and just keep my hands busy for an hour or two. Didn't really succeed at what I was trying to accomplish w...

Sneak peek - Tigerdragon design

I've been fighting off pain for better part of the month now, so the best way to get my mind off it is to get my brain some interesting food to chew on. So I challenged myself to design a tigerdragon.

More precisely: tiger-like dragon, earth-based in element, fitting to an existing franchise material, giving off a guardian vibe.

This is stage 1: Setting up the skull (mesh of tiger w...