Backgrounds are the most challenging. It took me four sittings (not consecutive) of about 2 hours each.

It's okay to leave your artwork and come back a few days later.

This helps:
🦊Reveal errors or strengths
Ever feel like you're happy with progress, then you leave it and come back and say "it looks different now"? Why? Something looks wrong or not the same as the reference or not how you thought it would look once the paint dries or you look at it from afar. Do the colours have harmony? The strokes? Bit all over the place? Did you miss a spot? All of these come in after your hyped up emotions and tiredness from drawing fades and you're refreshed and calm and view your art from a different perspective.

Facts are:
We overlook errors OR good aesthetic qualities.
Artists are moody, we may feel down and therefore expect the worst or feel high and expect too much. This kind of makes it unbalanced when we view our art. We may also be tired or stressed and often forget how our skills do manage to get the work done. What's it for you?

I am not really conscious of this often but now that everything is a bit calmer, I feel like pouring all these words out of me and my fox in the making.

Now that you've gone through a whole chunk of text let me drop in the picture.

Title: (untitled)
Medium: Colored pencils
Mitsubishi uni no. 888 and prismacolor
Year: 2022

My second formal fox drawing in hyperrealism. The attempt, rather.
The red and blue colours are so strong and that I did not expect. It just came out that way after I just picked up the pencils and did all the strokes.

Process Photos

I usually start with the nose. Boop!
Started out pretty vague and unclear because it was a messy mix of blue brown and black. Initial doubt as usual because I'm expecting clearly a result but forget the process sometimes is step by step and it may or may not always look nice 😉

Building up fur.
Starting with light colours to darker ones.
I use blue and yellow tones to start.

I did freak out with how much blue I decided to use for the "white" parts of the fur. Brown and gold tones too and green.
Often my art is pale so this time obviously Ive managed to turn that around! Thankfully.

Then building up the fur.
Sort of blur effect makes it puffy cloudy.

Le background.
Blues and violets and blending with a white pencil.

Then finished!

I'm always happy about the eyes. So pretty.

Next is having this framed with my owl art. Not now but soon. As promised I'd show you all the process once I finished it. The camera can't pick up the smaller details.

But done is officially done! Almost two months time. Achievement! 🌟