I thought I’d go into a bit more depth about the wolf design as it seems I didn’t communicate very well and the question is an interesting and illustrative one.
The reason I’ve been rattling on about realism and caricature lately is connected to the wolf design. The problem was how to depict a goblin-wolf without departing from the realistic style of the elf figure line. There are several objections to making the goblin-wolf look exactly like a real one, some are practical, a real wolf for example, even a large one is realistically, too small to carry a creature bigger than a four year old child.
However the more difficult matter which raises the question of the border of caricature and realism is in depicting and differentiating the wolf as a wolf (and of what kind, there are many varieties and wide variation within them) and not a dog. In real life many people could not tell a wolf from a dog except by it’s behavior, those who could would rely on subtle visual clues which their mind would automatically accentuate without them realizing it, as in the earlier point in this blog about recognition of faces in different cultures. The question is how and how much can wolfish characteristics be ‘brought out’ before the figure becomes a caricature. The solution I proposed was not to depart plausibility (since this is a fantasy creature and not even meant to be a normal wolf) and to accent wolfish characteristics only for clarification and differentiation, not simply exaggerating for emotional impact. It’s a fine point but I think it can be found.
The fur is the most problematic point, ‘real’ fur cannot practically be sculpted or cast on this scale, there are many ways of suggesting fur, unfortunately some have the effect of making the animal look cute and cuddly, others, perhaps the most ‘realistic’ ones do little to differentiate the wolf from a dog. One of my chief concerns was not to make something which looked like a shaggy German Shepherd (or Alsatian to our cousins in the U.K.) so I chose a bit more stylization than I would generally use. The result is a "fairy-tale wolf" but not an impossible beast and no one could mistake it for a dog or a hyena or, on seeing it, call it anything but a wolf though it is not exactly like one in many points of detail. The idea, put simply, was to make a wolf that looks a bit more like a wolf than a wolf does but not to the point of cartoon.
