Snack Fox
An introduction to my 'local fauna' art series
It was almost nine years ago that my I moved back to PEI. I grew up in Nova Scotia but had lived on the island for several years before and during my veterinary education, and my hubby was still American at that time (he’s fortunately been cured of that condition and is now a fully fledged Canuck). We had been living in the Caribbean, of all places, for several years and due to a whole bunch of reasons had decided to move to PEI.
I love the animals of any place, the wildlife, the ferals, and the pets. In St. Kitts we had vervet monkeys and little lizards, as well as sheep and ‘pet’ dogs roaming around (the idea of pet ownership was a little different there than we are used to in urban/suburban Canada).
The day we arrived was a pretty typical mid-February weather-wise, and as we drove through the streets of Charlottetown one of the first things we saw was an urban, island red fox trotting along the sidewalk. After years of seeing pretty lean wild and feral critters in the Caribbean, I had to chuckle at the somewhat spherical little canid we were now observing strolling down the street. The little dude was fluffy, fat, and self-assured. Clearly a fox who knew where all the best dining spots in the city were!
Sadly, over the intervening years I don’t see as many foxes about. I’m not sure if that’s me just not noticing, or if their numbers have declined. But that little guy who welcomed me back to the Maritimes has always stayed in my head.
Last year I decided to start a series of scratchboards that were a little less overtly fantastical than my usual work - and what I settled on was to do a series of local Canadian fauna, with my own whimsical twist of course! The first subject was to be that chubby fluffball of a fox.
As always, it starts with thumbnails…
The fox, who I decided was going to be called a ‘snack fox’ was the most clear in my mind, so my next step was a digital sketch to work out the dimensions and basic colour palette. A digital ‘mock-up’ if you will. I envisioned this series as having a little text blurb and so the mock-up also allowed me to plan where to leave space for future text to be added.
Unfortunately I didn’t take any work-in-progress (WIP) photos as I was working, but here is the final scratchboard art. This piece was done on a 10x10” cradled claybord.
And then the final print after text and border were added looks like so! This is one of my fine art prints, meaning that I have it printed on cotton rag paper using archival inks by a local PEI printer.
I finished the Snack Fox close to a year ago, just in time to show it at the Craft East Trade Show in Halifax last February. To my surprise and delight, it won Best New Product!!
So now I am working on finishing more in the series.
I got some distance on the House Hippo, but am unhappy with how the piece is developing and need to restart the board. But in the meantime I got a more clear vision of someone who wasn’t in my original lineup (due to an egregious oversight on my part)… but I’ll save that one for a later post!