Wolf Portrait 2014

 Photoshop CS4 / Manga Studio 5.0
Time: 20+ hours
Wacom Bamboo Fun Tablet

This piece took so long! I am glad that it is finally finished!
I used no reference for this, so certain things are off, i.e., fur direction and the nose. But otherwise, I am fairly happy with it. The background, however, is another story. The leaves were a pain!


Also, here's a fun fact, because I can and because you people should know this by now. (-:

Did you know that your typical wild wolf pack does not operate under an alpha, beta, and omega hierarchy? The terms are best applied to captive wolf packs, where assemblages are rough and artificial. In the wild, packs consist of a breeding pair and their offspring, and occasionally an unrelated animal. The problem with the term "alpha" is that it implies the opposite of what a wild wolf pack actually consists of.


"Labeling a high-ranking wolf alpha emphasizes its rank in a dominance hierarchy. However, in natural wolf packs, the alpha male or female are merely the breeding animals, the parents of the pack, and dominance contests with other wolves are rare, if they exist at all. During my 13 summers observing the Ellesmere Island pack, I saw none.

Thus, calling a wolf an alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a human parent or a doe deer as an alpha. Any parent is dominant to its young offspring, so "alpha" adds no information. Why not refer to an alpha female as the female parent, the breeding female, the matriarch, or simply the mother? Such a designation emphasizes not the animal's dominant status, which is trivial information, but its role as pack progenitor, which is critical information.

The one use we may still want to reserve for "alpha" is in the relatively few large wolf packs comprised of multiple litters. Although the genetic relationships of the mothers in such packs remain unknown, probably the mothers include the original matriarch and one or more daughters, and the fathers are probably the patriarch and unrelated adoptees (Mech et al. 1998). In such cases the older breeders are probably dominant to the younger breeders and perhaps can more appropriately be called the alphas. Evidence for such a contention would be an older breeder consistently dominating food disposition or the travels of the pack.

The point here is not so much the terminology but what the terminology falsely implies: a rigid, force-based dominance hierarchy. "

If you want to read more, please go visit www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/ma… . Great read!

Any questions? www.wolfquest.org/bb/viewforum… is the way to go.