Our Witch has a variety of little minions to do her bidding, and one not-so-little one:  the Beast. 

In the original text, the Beast was a big hyena.  I’m not terribly fond of them visually, and would rather not spend a lot of time painting them, so for my own sake I pushed for a more wolf-like interpretation. 

We toyed around with a few different versions: armor clad, mechanical, sculpted of earth and wood, and finally a spirit of soot and smoke.  To express this, I’ve used wet-on-wet and wet-on-damp india ink for the wolf, and watercolor for the prosthetic limb, as shown in the test painting above.  I was hoping to avoid incorporating india ink, despite loving the medium in isolation, but I couldn’t get the right textures with just watercolor.