[retrospective] Dale Donovan

Since the Sherlock Hound post was especially well-received on BSky, we considered following up immediately with a sequel picture, but Mofu was in the mood for drawing older dad-like characters, having recently discovered and become quite fond of this artist's work and particularly this character:

https://x.com/Destroycode
(this work also influenced Mofu to draw sock garters for the first time!)

This might sound strange given that most of Mofu's drawings have been of younger twinks like Mr. Wolf and Robin Hood, and while those characters are certainly appealing in terms of their design or personality, what Mofu actually finds especially attractive are like 30-60 year olds who are calm with deep voices and boast decent height and muscles. You can see this in Mofu's wolf OC Rolf who's basically meant to embody the things Mofu finds hot.

I suggested that Mofu draw Rolf, but Mofu generally doesn't like posting their OCs, partly because it's a bit personal/private and mostly because we know viewers would very much prefer seeing a character they already know. Thus, we decided to go with Dale.

As for the pose, we took some inspiration from this illustration I came across:



You can see the similarities in the initial sketch, but Mofu ultimately scrapped it because the proportions didn't look right and the legs covered up too much of the torso.

We scrapped the second sketch, too, because it just didn't seem like Dale at all. A pose this lascivious (and a torso this small) was much more like Nick than a grumpy old wolf cop.

Finally, we settled on a look that was more like, "So if I give you this then you'll tell me what I want to know?" Now that I think about it, maybe we should've written some dialogue 😫

For the clothes, we wanted to try something other than Dale's usual outfit since we'd already done that before. He does have a spiffy skin in the El Pelicano DLC, but the outfit is all too dark, so we wanted to combine it with this other outfit of his we saw (on the right), though we weren't a fan of the yellow pants.

Fortunately, while looking up Dale Donovan reference pictures, we happened upon an artist's re-imagining of Dale and liked the outfit on the very right:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dya4WQ

And that's pretty much everything! We did wonder whether it was worth expending time and energy drawing a proper background, but since this isn't a Patreon-exclusive we ultimately decided that a simple background color and shadow would be fine this time 🤭

Anyway, enjoy the timelapse!