XI: I go over the wolf with red, yellow and blue washes to balance the red and blue of his outfit and counter the green; then several washes of grays. These grays are mostly from mixing black and white, so it’s neutral but not cold, like the cobalt in the background. You can see several areas of choppy white where I tried to highlight the tail, it looks for all the world like soap. ^^”
I also go over the jacket’s seams with white drybrush, to get that accordion look that denim seams have of stark blue and white.

XII: This part is absolutely batfuck (and I wouldn’t have bothered except to impress you, dear viewer – unlike digital art, traditional art is fun when it takes fucking forever to draw). I use the rigger and layers of black and white to draw layer after layer of Leonardo Da Vinci style curly locks (Jay Defeo’s work was a big influence here). Then I wash the layer down, so I have a faint imprint of hair, and begin again. With luck, it’ll capture multiple layers beneath the fur. Here’s a face half-completed.
(Between the hair and the poofy neck, I swear this looks like a 1977 Disco Dude with his collar thrown open.)

XIII: The biggest jump in the piece, I promise. I forgot to scan some stages ^^”
I add the orange glow to the hand in really thin layers, and paint the cigarette (the tip is, of course, stylized, as the little chops of tobacco brushed black against the glow are fucking impossible to paint at this size. That tobacco point is probably five millimeters wide on the page). Now we get the color of an opposing light source.
The tail’s about done, so I add several layers of fur to his face. The lower jaw I wash, but with a rigger, and in a broken pattern, so the bits of blank page resemble stubble. Little washes of color…
If you look at the face, you can see I haven’t tried to really draw a wolf since high school. An interesting challenge, their faces are very lumpy when you get down to it. I layer some thin blue and pink onto it, I add some olive-yellow to his eye sockets to capture that lupine glare look, add patches of white line to his face and drybrush to his head, to soften the transition and make plausible the fluorescent light.
The neck gets a little bit of a trim and juts out a little at the bottom, like this wolf I once sketched at a zoo… I find that part of the neck interesting. And, finally, now that the fur is done, I go to the details. The nose gets a few rubs and shines, the mouth gets its lips thickened with either the Sumi brush or the edge of the rigger. Dog lips are fun but thick (I’ve never owned anything less fluffy than a Wheaten, so I have no childhood memories of dog lips to compare it to… except my uncle’s Weimaraner, perhaps?). The eyes are pierced with a low red-orange burnish, and set off with a pinge of white around the edges. Eyes call for ridiculous detail, because neurotypical individuals overwhelmingly look at the eyes first, and it’ll color the entire painting. It’s kinda funny, innit?
Respect this detail – the shines on the metal aglets on the end of the bolo tie? Those are less than half a millimeter wide, and I had to impasto those. You’re welcome. The lace of the tie is just a couple of rope textures, not much to say about those…
The bolo itself, based off a design I found online, I decided to set off the red and blue with some dull cyan. And, for added “sad indian” sentimentality, the design is a really teeny “End of the Trail” by Frederick Leighton. You know that painting. Come the hell on.

XIV: Now for the foliage. I use three greens - an “olive”, a “forest,” and a “spring” green. I begin with layers of yellow, phthalo and ochre. Green is an optical illusion, caused by the fact that our eyes can’t see the mix of yellow and blue, because of the cones. (If you’ve ever stared at blue with one eye and yellow with the other, and buzzed your eyeballs till they combined in binocular vision, the color isn’t exactly green. I have no idea what to call it, though.)
I’m also mildly colorblind on the green spectrum (I don’t know how this works, ask the tests). So chances are I’m missing something here. ^^” Go easy on me.
Once the wash is down, I layer the first two onto the trees and the second onto the grass. I scumble them for texture (it doesn’t matter, I’ll be painting the sky into those upper leaves). Brown would dim this part of the picture down and balance it too well with the top gutter, so I paint the bark shadows orange instead, to unify that corner of the picture with the cigarette.