Digital Illustration
Great Grey Wolf Sif
The Great Grey Wolf Sif was a painting I created in 2018 and donated as a raffle prize for Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ). It was one of the larger projects I’ve worked on, and once it sunk in that my painting would be seen by tens of thousands of people, definitely the most nerve-wracking one. The whole painting process was done in SAI2 and Photoshop over the course of couple weeks.
The great thing about working with SAI2 over Photoshop is that SAI2 uses very little resources in comparison, so I was able to work with much bigger file than if I was painting solely on Photoshop. The full painting was ~12000px; a size I couldn’t have worked on with Photoshop alone as every stroke of a brush or adjustment required a few seconds of buffering with it.
Sif, the Great Grey Wolf (灰色の大狼シフ) is a character and boss in the 2011 action role-playing game Dark Souls. A wolf that has grown to a massive size, it protects the grave of its deceased master, Knight Artorias the Abysswalker, and the Covenant of Artorias, a ring that allows its wearer to traverse the Abyss, a dark void normally impassable by mortals. The fight with Sif has been cited by critics as one of the most memorable in the game due to the role reversal of the player as a transgressor. Sif also functions as an optional ally in the game’s DLC.
Games Done Quick is a semiannual video game speedrun charity marathon. Their second flagship event is Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ), which raises money for Doctors Without Borders. The events are broadcast live on Twitch and the viewers are encouraged to donate for incentives and raffles.
I had already decided this was to be one-of-a-kind prior to finishing the painting; once the physical print was confirmed delivered by the GDQ, I deleted the original high-res digital file so future prints wouldn’t be possible with that size and quality.
In retrospect, I might have handled it differently, since I had no way to prove the original was deleted, and some people were skeptical. These days, AI can upscale lower-resolution images anyway. But ultimately, it was about the art itself—making it truly one-of-a-kind was what made it so special to me, and hopefully to whoever won the painting.
What can be labeled, packaged, mass produced is neither truth nor art.
Leigh Bracket