Today I'm making a tutorial covering how to draw one of those giant monster dogs from the game "Elden Ring". If you need to get yourself familiar with what they are, here is a great YouTube video showing them in action! I haven't beat the game yet but they are some of my favorite enemies so far and really add to the sense of dread wandering within the rot-infested region known as "Caelid". So first things first, if you want to draw something, reference helps. You can either search "caelid dogs" or capture screenshots of them from videos with (Window + PrtScn). Technically, there are other smaller poisonous dogs in the area but Caelid is iconic for the large ones for sure. With Google, you can filter the images by size by clicking on Images-Tools-Size and the larger the better because they are higher quality images.
Now, pick and choose good reference and scrap the rest. This one here is good because it just the entire monster of a dog up close. The reference is a little blurry but it shows a lot of what the creature is. 
These ones have a better view of the teeth.
These ones have a visible arms and poses we can emulate.
So as you can see, they are basically T-rex dogs. I wonder how they got that way, maybe they were once normal dogs but mutated due to the scarlet rot infestation across the land. Either way, I will never forget the sheer terror of facing these insane creatures. Moving on... we will need a canvas. 128px should be large enough but we probably won't need the whole thing. I'm going to use a red background because the environment they are found in has red skies and it's easier to work with than the default Aseprite "checkerboard" background. This will also help with the color choices for the dog because it will have a slight red tint from environmental lighting. Then we sketch. When sketching, try prioritize the features from most important to least. It doesn't have to be in this order but for example...
Priorities
- Body
- Super Large Head
- Legs
- Arms
- Ears
- Tail
- Texture
If you draw the sketch too big or too small, you can always change it but it's better to get it right early on so you don't have to repolish all the details in the end. I'm going to include a side view sketch so you can see a clear pose and anatomy breakdown. This should make it easier for you to translate it into a final pose.
From here you can start drawing it with your own changes. I chose to draw it from the front with a slight angle because in game they are usually chasing you head on ready to chomp.
I gave him some simple dark gray colors for now but in the polish stage, he will be slightly redder from lighting.
From here we can see that we need to adjust his pose a bit. He's standing too tall, he needs more of a squat, and his arm look too dead hanging straight down like that so here's the fix below. I think the change in pose also emphasizes the size of his head a bit more.
I wanted to give him a more wild-aggressive look so I tried to give him a running pose with a tilted head. 
A really simple way to make them look just... pure insane is to make there eyes wide open and adding high contrast to it.
Now is probably an okay time to start shading him. We can start adding some more believable lighting at this point and rendering out how skinny and starved these guys are.
I reduced the size of his lower jaw slightly just to give him a cute but disturbing puppy look.
There's a few variants of the dogs that have red glowing eyes for some reason and something about it I just find mysterious and eerie almost like they might have hidden supernatural powers so I went with it. Not to mention, but the red eyes blend well with the environment.
Giving him a dangly tongue definitely gives him a blood-thirsty look.
He seems to be lacking any fur at all so I'll try to render some at least on his face. This can easily be done by drawing just a few spikes jutting out.
I gave a scar across his main visible eye and stabbed him in the side. They aren't actually found wounded like this in game, but there is an area where "Redmane" soldiers from a nearby castle are discovered battling the dogs so I thought it would be a nice touch to the drawing.
Finally all there is to do is just polish. Not much else to say at this point, all the key features are in place, now it's just a matter of rendering out the details. However I will say, I needed to emphasize a few things here: the scarlet-red color in general, the number of teeth and teeth color, the demon dog ears, and the skinny-starved look. So these are the final sprites.
That's it for this tutorial. So far Elden Ring is a really amazing game, and I always look forward to playing it. I hope some of you will also give it a shot in the future but I'll see you in the next tutorial! 👋