Hello, children of Hephaestus, will you join me in building a beautiful, wild machine? Today I have illustrated a wolf, but not just any wolf, this time it's a mechanical one, with iron jaws, which is quite dangerous to be honest, I wouldn't like to be on his menu, although come on, he's a mechanic, he must surely eat nuts and drink oil.

This metal wolf is part of the commissions that I've been doing for @smanuels, but this time something has changed, and it's that he didn't give me the usual specific description, for this and another character, I had to use a little more my imagination, he told me "illustrate a black and gold mechanical wolf in a mountainous steppe", so immediately I put to work the gears of my head to build this animal machine, I took my pencil and my tablet, a little music and I started like Mr. Pool to make the drawing.

Tools:

• Wacom Intuos 4
• Photoshop
• Medibang Paint

I had to go to Google for wolf references, which is a bit difficult since you mostly find images of them howling, but I wanted a more fierce and threatening position, that of a hunter.

Once the wolf structure was ready, I started to add gears, cables and all kinds of mechanical parts I could think of, it was very crazy and took me a lot of time because all the time I was imagining how each part of the mechanism should work, especially in the joints of the legs, which should have more mobility and strength.

The colour had to be black and gold, so I applied them as base shades, I also added the colours of the background, taking into account low vegetation and mountains in the distance.

I think you will agree with me when I say that everything is very opaque and dark, so I started the detailing using lighter shades. Normally, I discarded all the outline and painted over it, but this time I made a lot of effort to outline it and it looks pretty good, so I only covered it a little in the head area.

In Photoshop I selected a brush with an oil texture and I went crazy, I selected several color tones and went to work on the background, I didn't want something very detailed, the intention was to make a landscape that wouldn't steal the main character's attention, so I gave brushstrokes to establish shapes, some mountains, rocks and grass, once I had these shapes ready, I reduced a little the brush hardness and softened the textures, mixing the tones and defining the landscape more.

I'll leave you a little gif with the whole process in it, so you can better appreciate the step by step.