So I added a light and set the type to “Sun”. Something I wanted to try with this piece was to emulate how light would actually fall on the scene. Now I can make this collection visible when I want to see how the piece will look with them, but I keep it hidden for the majority of them time I’m working with grease pencil. Having active point lights in the scene really slows my files down, so I created a new collection for them. I also had a vision of giving the wolf glowing red eyes, and so I quickly placed two point lights in the eye sockets and made them vibrant red. I deleted the stroke layer that got created, and gave the fill material a colour that would be the base colour of each section of the piece. The wolf, foliage, mountain and water are their own grease pencil objects. Then I converted them to grease pencil objects, while also checking the option that says “keep original”. I gave them a solidify modifier and a decimate modifier (to reduce the face count as much as possible!) Happy with the meshes, it was time to convert them to grease pencil. GREASE PENCIL: convert meshes to grease pencil I was able to make sure that this 3D piece read well, even as a 2D piece from any angle. I also recently discovered that, in solid view mode, you can give all your meshes a flat shader, and this ended up being incredibly helpful to see how the outlines of everything looked together. I use the grease pencil to draw the edges of the leaf masses and then I convert these strokes into paths, and use the knife project tool to cut these areas out of the meshes. I’ve had this idea for a while of making foliage from deformed spheres and grease pencil. And so I kept this goal in mind as I sculpted, wanting the legs at that angle to read as three tree trunks. My vision was for the scene to start at an angle that would trick the viewer into thinking these were just trees on a hill, and then it would turn and reveal that it’s a wolf with a tree tail.

The bottom right window is looking through my main camera, and this is the view at the start of the illustration. I always add extra views of my scene – the top right window is looking through a second camera with a scale value of -1 on the X axis, so that I could keep in mind how my piece looks mirrored – flipping your canvas is a helpful trick for drawing and I wanted to use that here!

In fact, looking back, I added too much detail to the fur of the neck. I focus on big shapes, as detail will be drawn on top with grease pencil. I used the snakehook tool and would hold shift to occasionally smooth out areas. My sculpting process is constantly changing, but for this piece all the meshes started as spheres and I sculpted using dynamic topology. So in addition to recreating this piece in 3D with grease pencil, I also used dozens of reference images to try to get a more realistic tree wolf. I’m still very proud of it, but since then I’ve studied animal anatomy a lot more closely and… well, let’s just say I can see how much I didn’t know at the time. I made this illustration at the start of 2019: I have a long history of Red Riding Hood retellings – they’re all different, but for some reason they always involve a giant tree wolf.

Grease pencil animation blender