Hey everyone! For today’s #WerewolfWednesday I thought I’d show you the process of designing the Murder Puppy enamel pin, which you can get as a reward by pledging to the WEREWOLVES VERSUS: Volume 1 Kickstarter at the “CHOMP” tier, or higher.

I’d known for a long time before the campaign that I wanted to make an enamel pin as part of the reward offerings. I’m a big fan of pins – I have a denim vest that’s got what feels like 40 pounds of badges and enamel pins on it, and I love adding new and weird pins to the collection.

The idea for the design came from the same place where so many of my creative notions take root: a dumb throw-away Twitter post in which I referred to werewolves as being “murder puppies”. I like the juxtaposition of cute and monstrous, so the idea of a ravening lycanthrope being presented as something superficially cuddly was very appealing. I knew for certain that the artwork would need to be done in the 1920s “rubber hose” character style recently popularized by the beautiful game Cuphead. Then, as with many of my ideas, I did nothing with it for a few months.

In June, with all of the other reward art assets ready and the campaign launch fast approaching, I knew it was time to actually design the pin. At the time, I was at Layers, a design conference in San Jose, and I’d received a nice little notebook and pen as part of the conference swag. Inspired in part by Andy McNally, a prolific taker of sketch notes who sat near me during the conference, I closed my laptop and began to doodle some ideas in my notebook.

The first even remotely successful design.

A little more refined, with the right balance of cute and dangerous, but still working out the teeth.

Refining the nose shape. My previous “mushroom-shape” noses were all too cat-like. Side note: image searching for “wolf noses” gives some wonderful results.

Figuring out the pin background. The pin needed to have a less jagged shape than the wolf head alone, and the text needed a place to sit. A full moon was the obvious choice.

Once I had a concept I liked, it was time to turn it into a digital image. Given the roughness of my sketches, I knew I couldn’t simply use Photoshop and Illustrator to extract the lines. I needed someone who could Actually Draw to create a digital illustration that I could then manipulate, so I turned to my wife, Tandye Rowe (whose art is also on the Werewolf Jaws bandana and one of the stickers offered as rewards). In short order she delivered a hi-res PNG file for me to work with.

No more sketchy pen lines!

From this crisp image I was able to create a vector file in Illustrator, and then work on refining the details and joining some of the lines – a requirement for the way colours work in enamel pin production. The result is a pin design that fulfills my original “cute/deadly” concept and which will look awesome on my vest – or yours!

You may be tempted to pet him. Do not.

To get this pin for yourself (plus so much more, including a massive book of werewolf art, comics, stories, and other content very much in line with the “murder puppy” ethos, check out the WEREWOLVES VERSUS: Volume 1 Kickstarter.