This one took 7 hours in total to make, from posing a 3D model in Blender to use as reference, to gathering images of german shepherds looking a bit down but not too down to get the ears right, to drawing it in paper with a rough tipped pencil, to taking a picture of it and uploading it to my computer, to using PaintDotNet to increase the contrast and remove the lines of the paper from the body of the drawing itself.

AND IT WAS SO WORTH IT HOLY SHIT like this isn't the kind of shit I ever thought myself even REMOTELY capable of, and I only started drawing like two years ago?? Sure I still had to use a 3D model to get the pose right but god damn it a lot of people just do that in their minds anyways so is there really a difference? I don't think so, quite honestly. Yeah it takes a lot longer, but if the result is the same, I think it's fine.

>>>>>Now for the funny moments:
1. I only noticed that I was drawing on the kind of paper with a bunch of lines after I was 100% finished with it and taking the pictures, which led to an extra 2 hours being spent erasing those lines in PaintDotNet (which was, to be fair, super relaxing and akin to mining in Minecraft). My brain is, indeed, quite big.

2. The pencil I've been using only has about an inch of wood left, so I stick it into the body of an empty pen I have. But, since the tip was so rough and dull, I decided to sharpen it yesterday! So I did and doodled some with it, kinda liking and kinda hating it. Then today when I got it out to draw this, guess what, the tip broke off **completely**. So I ended up having to shorten the pencil by half its size to get another dull tip out, which I used to draw this piece. And that is why I will never ever sharpen my pencils again :3

3. I found out a bit of a trick on how to do fur that flows nicely and doesn't look robotic or artificial. Do one big spike, and do one small spike. Sometimes double the big or the small spike, and don't go back all the way with the big ones. And bam! It looks fine. Now, the shape of the fur was tricky here. I wanted the sides to be mostly flat but no matter what it always came out like it ended up - kind of pointing outwards to the left and to the right, respectively. The one on the right not so much, but the one on the left for sure, and well, human brains are kind of hard wired to read from left to right since kindergarten, so..

4. I may or may not have made this piece just to use it on a character sheet in a v*** server. Now now, calm down, no I don't like v***, never did. But the guy asked real nicely, and the server isn't exclusively about the thing, just like the HLSR Discord server was never exclusively about HLSR, so I joined it anyway. It's just mostly chatting about random stuff and being friendly or hating one another - you know, like most servers are. But one of the staff did ask me to make a sheet so I thought "if I'm gonna do it anyway, why not look cool and edgy while I do it". And since my 'sona - whenever in these kinds of contexts - gets really.. downsized, I did an angle from above. And it turned out really fuckign cool lmao