Night Vale Community College - Fall Semester

Many of the students at the Night Vale Community College have coyote heads. No particular reason why; maybe it's because the desert is a good habitat for coyotes. Along with pretty much every other part of North America. Not picky, are coyotes.

One thing they DO tend to prefer is the company of college freshmen. And no, it has nothing to do with the masks. It's just that coyotes are comfortable with a pack-order, and new students at the college are less likely to challenge the alpha.

Welcome To Night Vale fan here. I've loved the whole idea of the coyote-headed college students ever since they were listed as attendees at a funeral for Intern Maureen. But when the bonus episode "Minutes" mentioned the requirement for freshmen at the Night Vale Community College to wear plague masks, this particular idea for a piece of fan art popped into my head, and it's been knocking around there ever since. 

My usual process is to do a rough sketch, scan it to my computer, and then futz with the lines in photoshop for a week or so. This time I wanted to try something new, so there's been minimal work done to the original scan: sepia (sort-of) overlay, adjusted the darkness of the pencil lines, and then colored the leaves. Done. Maybe two evening's worth of work altogether.

Apropos of nothing, but the wikipedia page for coyotes describes their social organization as either a nuclear family or "loosely-knit packs of unrelated individuals". For some reason that appeals to me greatly


I used this very helpful piece of stock photography for the poses: fandragon.deviantart.com/art/S… The student on the right ended up with a lot more of a defensive posture than in the original photo, but I was channeling my 18-year-old self for that one, so it felt right.