It's Sunday! Aka the only day of the week I can dedicate to drawing!

Here's my entry to @zeroooc's Sketch Off Contest

Process

Research

Right away my brain went to the Korean mythical Fire Dogs, or BulGae. This wiki article gives a decent explanation, but to summarize, they're basically literal dogs made of fire that would constantly try to steal bits of the sun or moon to give light to their dark kingdom, at the command of their king. Unfortunately, the sun would be too hot and the moon too cold, so they always let go and returned empty handed. This story was used to explain the eclipses, with the dark bits being where the dogs had covered the sun/moon with their mouths.

It's kind of a sad story when you think about it. All the darkness kingdom wants is a little bit of light!

I remember first reading it in a book of Korean folklore my parents had when I was in elementary school. For this contest, I researched it again to refresh my memory and see if there were any physical descriptors I could use. I was surprised to learn that there's actually a breed of Korean dog called BulGae, no doubt inspired by the story! They're basically big husky Jindos, but with a dark maroon coat. They were almost hunted to extinction, but luckily a Korean university intervened and have started breeding them back.

This was the only decent picture I could find:

Source

I thought it'd be fun to use the literal BulGae to influence the look of my imagined BulGae. Since my own dog is part Jindo, I'd also had some experience drawing that type of dog. With my reference image opened, it was time to start drawing!

Thumbnails

First I wanted to figure out how I was going to actually draw the dog. I used a yellow highlighter to find my gesture, then went over it in pencil to get the lines. I actually liked how it turned out, even if it was a bit more cutesy than I was initially envisioning. But I decided to go along with it and play to my strengths.

I knew I wanted to incorporate the myth and have the sun as a ball, but I wasn't sure how to have the dog interact with it. I sketched out a couple ideas off some references, but none really hit it off. I free sketched a couple poses, and the last one I ended up liking. Earlier that day I had been trying to train my own dog to recognize the word "ball", with mixed results, haha. I liked the idea of a stubborn BulGae who'd already burned/frozen his mouth several times, yet his owner insists he get the ball one more time. Spitz-type dogs tend to be fairly stubborn as a rule as well, so I thought it was a good fit.

Drawing

I took the prompt rules very literally haha, so I drew this with entirely traditional medium. I sketched it again on A4 paper with a regular ol' pencil, then went over it in my Fine-tip PITT artist pen. Then I colored in the inner flames, and added more line weight for dimension.

I did film a process timelapse as I was drawing for both the thumbnails and the final drawing, which I'll share later this week! :D

Digitizing

Obviously we have to get the final piece computer ready! Since I still haven't figured out how to use our scanner properly, I took a photo with my phone camera, transferred it to my desktop, and adjusted the image in Photoshop to get the nice clean look below!

And here we are! I hope you enjoyed reading and following along with the process. Thanks again to @zeroooc for running this contest! I had a lot of fun drawing this stubborn spicy boi.

Good luck to everyone else in the contest!

credit to @zomagic