The First Full Moon for a Strange, Small Pack

This was done for 's contest with the theme "Spring Play". I was inspired to do a piece based on my housemates. We are an odd group, though not bound by blood, our kinship is neigh unbreakable. I also ended up adding one of my non-human housemates, my cat Kuuga, as he insisted on sitting on the right side of my hip or leg whenever I worked on this.

The wolf in the foreground is a true shamanic wolf spirit. The one leaping in the center of the picture is a kindly but eerie shapeshifting trickster. To the far left is the normal human transformed into a werewolf by strange circumstances. To the far right is Guard's closest attempt to taking a werewolf form -- the monstrous beast version of the werewolf myth.

I need to do a few studies with my different designs for various types of werewolves. The two black wolves have ribcages shaped more like a quadraped, while the other two have a flattened ribcage and full clavicle. The wolf to the right has a full anthropoid build, has the normal human number of incisors, and human eyes. The leaping wolf is more fanciful, with sharper teeth (with canid incisor counts), oversized forepaws, and large glowing eyes to make him more of a spooky monster than accurate wolf. The wolf in the foreground was my attempt at depicting a wolf as accurately as possible (save for the more human mobile shoulders and wavy mane). As for the monstrous wolf, I based the musculature (particularly the abdominals) on a bully whippet (a dog breed with a myostatin deficiency -- they develop significantly more individual muscle fibers than a normal dog).

Grayscale version here: [link]