Fox illustration

red fox cartoon illustration

In France she would be called La Renarde and would be hunted with only her cunning to protect her

A little quicky to show you this fox illustration I’ve done for the Learning Department at National Museum Cardiff. They’ve designed a winter wildlife trail for kids and wanted a little mascot to go on signposting and stickers for the kids. After a few goes at drawing foxes I sketched out this critter, inked her up with Indian ink and a brush (a Proarte Prolene Plus size 3 is my favourite inking brush – it keeps a lovely point), and then scanned the inked design. I photoshopped out any smudges and dust speckles, and then took this image into Illustrator and live-traced it, which is a good way of turning a basic drawing into a vector file (a vector file is a file made up of mathematical equations and data rather than pixels, so it can be enlarged as big as you like without degrading). You can choose the colour range and detail level in the live tracing; I chose greyscale and a fairly high amount of detail so as to retain the organic nature of the brushstrokes. I then simply drew a red shape for the fur and yellow for the eyes on a layer behind the traced drawing, and added a little white highlight for the eyes. Done!