The Fox Familiar

This is my entry for 's Fox Competition using her stock image [link]

Umm, it's been a strange few days for me painting this one. Perhaps it's because I'm away from the Day Job of Doom, the pressure is off, and I've got more time to relax but it felt so different working on this piece. I'm not sure if it's obvious to anyone else looking at it but I think its very different to my usual stuff too although if you pushed me to explain how I'm not sure I could - weird.

Anyway, the brief was to create an image using Mizzd's Stock and include a fox in it in some way, preferably a fox companion. So I was reading up on fox mythology and found out that after cats, foxes were the next most likely creature to be believed to be a witch's familar which gave me the idea for the composition. I gave her red hair to match the fox (well, it was red on the reference photo anyway) and kind of made her skirt match with the fox's tail too. Oh, and added some fox-gloves into the back ground . I had thought about doing some Northern Lights in the background ( in Norse mythology foxes create the lights) but I didn't want it to be a night scene so in the end I went for a vignette instead.

Detail here --> [link]

Original is watercolours on A3 hot-pressed paper