Initially our colourboard would have used real wolves, but real wolves lacked the nightmarish colourscheme we wanted, and so we switched to concept art and abstract-ism.
Fortunately, we not had lots of wolf images to draw from, a handful of which included nice clear images of snarling wolves. As this would be the primary expression for the wolf in our animation, I figured it would serve well to post them.
The first thing that is apparent is that the nose and the teeth become the most prominent parts, with a large mane of rough and the eyes becoming more like small beacons against the furrowed brow. A good thing to keep in mind when it comes to designing and modelling the creature.