Fox Sketches

I didn't get to sit down and do a full painting this week as planned, owing to summer related fatigue and having a bored 8 year old. However, I did get to experiment with digital drawing using my smart phone, which is about the most convenient gadget nowadays for those who have bad backs and need to draw lying down before going to sleep in 5 minutes or so.

What I ended up with are rough sketches, digitally painted with colors that I had played around with and ready for me to transfer more confidently using my traditional painting medium. I think process-wise, it is convenient to be able to do quick coloring digitally before doing the actual painting. This way, I am not too committed with the colors yet, could change them easily and enjoy the painting process more.

I am drawing foxes lately because I love foxes. If I wrote a story, I'm sure I'll be having at least one fox in it. In the below images, I pencil sketched a realistic drawing of a fox to help me look at what features are essential and what features I can do without. I then drew a small non-realistic head beside it moving towards a more symbolic image. I took a photo of my pencil sketch using my samsung galaxy note phone (I was too tired to use the scanner), and then colored it using the phone as well.  I liked how the pencil lines looked on the blue fox, a bit rough. I used a digital pencil on the orange fox and the leaves outlines, the result had a slightly different feel but I liked it too. I also liked the blue color on the fox although I don't think there are real blue foxes around, what we do have is a popular restaurant here in Victoria called "the blue fox cafe", so "blue foxes" aren't that hard to imagine I suppose.

This next drawing was when I was really sleepy. I just wanted to get the colors in and see how they would look. The left side of the image is darker because I took a quick photo under a lampshade which then showed the shadows on the left side. A clean illustration wasn't necessary on this one. After this drawing, I decided I liked the top fox heads and wanted to explore them further using Photoshop.

Below are the fox heads redrawn and repainted using Photoshop. Here I am experimenting with different types of digital brushes (pencil and ink brushes) on the outlines. I find that I quite prefer pencil-like outlines which are not too well-defined, almost looking like smudges compared to the more defined lines from the ink brush. For me, the rough outlines make the drawing feel more non-digital and raw. What I don't like though is using the digital pen to draw. I find it pretty difficult to control and uncomfortable to be drawing on a pad and looking at the screen (maybe if I had a Cintiq, it would be better?). I used primary and secondary colors for this one.

Ahhh, so there you go. I got to practice working digitally and explored ways to achieve some sort of non-digital feel to my digital drawings. Not too bad for two night's work. Now I can go back to the comforts of my ink and watercolors and leave my digital explorations for another day. 

Fox design for my printed contact card