Work in Progress - Winter fox painting Part 1

I thought I would share with you guys the current wildlife painting I am working on. It has a bit of a wintry theme going on. I'm pleased with how it is turning out so far and think it would make some nice little Christmassy (sorry I said the word!) prints. I hope to be able to do this in the near future with this painting as well as some other works but I'm not sure whether I'm going to use photos I take myself, invest in some more photography gear (ie lights), or see if I can find someone to take the photos.

As I am going on a little holiday to Iceland I thought that I would schedule stages of the painting to go up on my blog whilst I am away so you can see the painting progress. So from Sunday expect Part 2 and subsequent daily updates every morning!


Okay let's get started:

First, I wanted to create a wintery painting but I wasn't sure what animal to create a painting of. I decided against a robin as they are so overused but still wanted an animal that would fit nicely into a winter environment. One of my first ideas was to create a painting of a pair of bramblings - winter migrants to the UK in our colder months.. but I thought people would prefer a more well known animal. Although I still want to do this painting at some point. I thought about red deer bracing against winter blizzards and stoats in their ermine colours. But I decided upon the fox. There were 3 reasons for this: 

First a fox in it's winter coat is pretty stunning in the winter months and I remember seeing footage of one hunting through metre's thick snow in the TV documentary Yellowstone (you can find the clip on Youtube), secondly from a young age I loved foxes and even set up a little fox club and recruited everyone I could into it; and thirdly because I found a beautiful reference photo on MorgueFile that just worked really well with what I wanted to do.  This was to incorporate other seasonal aspects of nature: holly and ivy.

First job was to sketch out the fox and work on the positioning of some holly and ivy bush which the fox would be resting under. I sketched the image out in a muted blue so this would fit in well with the snowy background I was going to create.

Next I washed the background in a mix of blue and lavender tones to provide a base colour. I used a fan brush to allow for softer blending. This was left to dry so that a more opaque background layer could be created.

This more paint-rich layer was again softly blended. Greyer tones are also present to bring out the brighter areas that will be created on the fox and in the foreground later. Now it's time to add the leaves.

I added in some paler background leaves and branches. You can see the start of some darker leaves which I will spread out as well as berries and a trail of ivy leaves along the edge. 

These will be detailed in Part 2 this Sunday. Keep an eye out for the daily updates coming from then.