Red Fox

(Vulpes vulpes)

IUCN Conservation
Status:
Least concern

Distribution:
Across nearly the entire Northern Hemisphere - through Europe, Asia, North America and the northern parts of Africa - extending as far north as the edge of the Arctic Circle. Introduced (and now widespread) across mainland Australia.

The Red Fox is the largest of the true foxes, and one of the most widely roaming creatures on Earth, few wild beings have made so much of the world their home. She has followed human settlement outward across the centuries, and in doing so became, in places like here in Australia, a presence with a complicated story - brought over in the 1830s, she has thrived as a predator where she was never meant to be, at great cost to native species who did not evolve alongside her.

She is a being worth knowing honestly, in all her contradictions beautiful, adaptable, and, where she did not evolve to be, troubling.

She is lighter than she looks, her bones slender, her body made for agility - able to clear a fence over two metres high, and to leap high into the air when hunting, steering with that magnificent tail to land precisely on prey she has located by sound alone. Her hearing is extraordinary: she can catch the squeak of a mouse at a hundred paces. Her thick winter coat is dense, soft and long, built for exactly the cold she stands in here, with short "thermal windows" of fur on her face and lower legs through which she quietly manages her own warmth. And she is, by deep tradition, a creature of story - the shape-shifting kitsune of Japan, the nine-tailed fox-spirits of China and Korea, the trickster Reynard, the cunning companion of Coyote - watched closely by humans across the ages, and never quite caught.

About the project

I just love the reference we are looking at this season, and I hope you find it inspirational too.
These larger invitations into creativity are designed to get you curious about the being and their environments, curious about how you would like to portray them, and developing a relationship with them that is centred in awe and wonder.

That means you can approach this devotional creativity however you are inspired!
Write about the Red Fox in the image, tell her tale in poetry, collage, mixed media, weaving, sculpture, dance — anything that gets your wild animal body connecting to this wild being!

Since my devotional practice is in realistic drawing, that is what I have done — but it is not the only way to approach this project.

A note before you begin: our fox is standing not on natural rock, but on weathered, ice-bound concrete — cast blocks armoured against the sea, drilled holes and all. There's a quiet story in that, of a wild being making her way across the hard, human-made world we've left at the water's edge, and it's worth carrying with you as you draw. She is the single soft, curved, living thing among all those hard edges.

THE GRAPHITE VERSION tutorial

The videos are separated into

an introduction to the overall project - I talk about analysing the reference (the light, the colour possibilities, cropping, and why I chose the compositions I did)
Parts 1 through 4 - is where I work through and speak specifically about the background itself. There is a lot of this, click through to see different areas and how I approached them. I have cut the videos so that any narration is at the beginning of that part - only part 3 has no narration at all.
1. a gentle note - the deepest darks in this whole image are tiny (her eye, her paws and ear-backs, the drilled hole). Protecting those few true darks is what makes her read as the star of the story
Part 5 - the Fox - where I walk through placing our focus on the page

I have also supplied you with a colouring page

This acts as both your outline if you would like to trace the image, and a gentle way to engage with the image with colour medium of choice if you are not feeling the call to add them to your sketchbook.

While I recorded everything, there is a lot of repetition and quiet time, so skip ahead to where you would like to work on next or understand more of.

Have fun, and please share the beauty you make in the community if that feels good to you!