Ivan Tsarevich and the Grey Wolf
Song for this piece. Press play and let yourself experience the painting in a deeper way.
“I decided to become my own lecturer for a month.”
Lately, I have been focusing on improving in certain areas of painting which I want to be better at. One of those areas is environments. So, I decided to focus on drawing more environments for December 2025. And not just that, but I decided to become my own lecturer for a month.
I wanted to focus on studying organic environments, anything natural. Fields, planes, forests, mountains. This involved me doing compositional, greyscale and colour studies of paintings I liked. These would prepare me for my final assignment, which was to create a full illustration of a character in an environment. Everything had a deadline, and the final piece was due on 31st December. It felt like university again!
For my assignment, I decided to draw a scene from the Russian fairytale ‘Ivan Tsarevich and the Grey Wolf’. To be quite honest, this was my first time reading the story. It is one of those classic fairytales which seem rather dark or graphic to really be for kids! In fact, a lot of stories were originally like this before some of them became the Disney-fied versions we know them as now. Have a look at the original stories by Brothers Grimm. I guess kids were not so sheltered back then.
I encourage you to read this story first before I go on to share some of my thoughts about it. See if you can find the part that I based my piece off (I kept it PG). Otherwise, spoilers ahead.
Here are some things that piqued my interest:
How curious that the Wolf should choose to help Ivan out of pity for eating his horse! How much help he gave the prince! Interesting, since wolves are generally depicted as wicked creatures - this one was kindhearted (and hungry).
Ivan kept ignoring the Wolf’s advice which would have otherwise made Ivan’s life a lot easier. You would think he would have listened to the wolf the second time after he saw the consequences from disobeying the first time around. However, I think Ivan’s poor choices and the suffering and difficulty he experiences make it a lot easier to relate to him.
I love a particular line that describes the intermediary travelling which took place: “The tale is soon told, but the journey is not done quickly”. It made me think about all the daily and momentary challenges that Ivan would have felt along the way which weren’t described.
“Sometimes good enough is good enough.”
Back to the piece itself. I completed it in five days, which was the quickest I have ever managed for a piece this scale! I don’t normally give myself a deadline, and I find that the pieces drag on as I make perfection the aim, rather than to just have something made. In this case, I had to let go of things that weren’t perfect or that I felt could have used more work. Sometimes good enough is good enough. I also gave myself deadlines for the studies I did, and that worked well. So I guess I love deadlines now ♥
I was quite disciplined with my approach to this piece, and I really enjoyed applying all of the things I had been practicing in the studies beforehand. Once I had the story in mind, I started with some pencil sketches to try different compositions for different scenes. Then, I got my iPad out and made greyscale thumbnails in Procreate.
Once I chose the one I wanted to move forward with, I did a bit of rendering (adding detail). I then added colour using gradient maps. It was finicky but effective at laying down base colours.
Finally, I got to the fun part where I could put my earphones in and jam to music while I rendered the piece until it was completed. I gave it the final touches on the morning of the 31st.
This month taught me a lot about the value of discipline. Discipline is very satisfying and rewarding because it puts you on the path to get what you want. It is actually a friend. And although we may dread deadlines, they bring much needed order. I encourage you to try setting a reasonable deadline for something you are working on, commit to it and see how it helps you.
I’m really pleased that I was able to complete everything I set out to do in December. There’s so much more for me to learn with environments, but I am really glad at what I was able to learn and create. I hope you like the piece and got something out of what I shared!
“Discipline is very satisfying and rewarding because it puts you on the path to get what you want.”
