Kondo is one of the new characters I've made up over the past few years, role playing with my mate. He's one of three African Wild dogs I've got now. His younger brother, Dune, and his older cousin, Umpho, will hopefully get a similar treatment from me sometime in the future. We will see when the art muse grows strong enough again.

The art was done on GIMP 2. Photos of three African Wild Dogs I took at the London Zoo served as the reference for the head shot. The humanoid pose, I used a picture of a large werewolf did as a reference to get the stance and size of the limbs closer than my free-handing and looking at human references was getting me. Strangely enough, none of the human models I found with the right body shape had digitigrade legs, and I wasn't figuring their dimensions for a humanoid out no matter how many quadruped canines I looked at. I checked with Zaush before using his picture as a reference, and he had no issue with me using his picture as a reference for the pose. He said I didn't have to reference the picture, but I at least wanted to mention him. Go check him out. He does art as more than a passing hobby and break from writing, so it all looks much better than mine.

I started this up in March because I was wanting to get a reference sheet made for my African Wild Dog characters in case my mate and I decided to commission any pictures. The species is such an incredibly diverse one with fur pattern and there are so many artists you can find that draw amazing members of it, I just felt I needed to get a rough sketch of the idea down, much like the character descriptions I try to keep off to the side for my longer stories. I figured it would be more prose than pictures, like my rat fursona's reference sheet. But I'm not a real complex looking rat. African wild dogs are. And my simple reference was not cutting it for what I wanted, so I figured I'd so a really simplistic drawing to map things out. But my first attempts were not something i'd want to show anyone, even an artist I hoped to spin stick figures into reference sheets. Which kept pushing me to work harder. I knew I'd never be fully happy with it because it looked like how I see it in my brain perfectly. I would have needed to focused on art a lot more a lot earlier in life and never done anything else.

But I kept at it until my vision "broke" overnight. I'm back to seeing as well as I used to -- or close enough it doesn't matter in the big picture. But waking up and the computer screens being too blurry to read and not getting everything straightened out for a month not only took the wind out of my sails for both this art project, writing, and my job, it practically wrecked the ship. Looking back now, it was a challenge to overcome and move on from. A the time? very frightening to have happen. And aggravating when the first prescription and set of glasses failed to bring screens into focus.

But, I've spent the last few days returning and finishing the clean reference sheet you see here. It's no masterpiece, but it gets the job it needs to do done (I hope). And. this end product is so much better than my earliest attempts, so I've grown. So this step is done, and hopefully some day, I'll commission one of the many artists who has made pictures of African Wild Dogs I admire to make Kondo really shine.

Final comment is that I intend to do a less clean version as well, but have to do a lot more research and practice on how to draw the required steps to get there. Strangely, seeing as many adult pics as I have over the years hasn't magically made me able to draw everything needed. When my artistic urge recharges, I'll get back to work on that. Or maybe Dune. Time will tell.