This month Dick Vincent is our guestblogger. His illustrations can be found in our new Sketchbook (now available for pre-order) and the Flow Journal Pack.
One of the questions I regularly get asked is ‘why a fox?’ so I thought I’d use my third post to attempt explain why foxes crop up so often within my work. Over the past few days I’ve contemplated what exactly it is that draws me into drawing foxes in the way that I did for Art School tutorials, after all this deep contemplating the only reasoning I could come up with is ‘because I want to draw a fox’, one of the major differences between making art at Art School and making art for yourself is that you get to draw what you want without having to come up with a reason and this is something I love about what I do. Initially the first few foxes that I drew were because 1) They fit into the colour pallet (Autumnal tones, mainly oranges, browns and greens) that run through my work and 2) because foxes are my favourite animals and their shifty yet wise appearance works well being the punch line within my work.
These days you’d be hard pushed to scroll through Instagram or Pinterest without bumping into an illustrated fox, and by no means am I going all hipster and saying ‘I was drawing foxes before they were cool’ I’m aware there’s artist that did it before me and they’ll be ones after that most likely be better, but I feel the fox has become an integral part of my work, whenever I’m stuck for inspiration I’ll draw a fox because I’ve drawn so many that I could draw them in my sleep. One of my favourite poems ‘The Thought Fox’ by Ted Hughes (see image) uses a fox as a metaphor for the poet prising out inspiration, which I guess is a similar idea to how I work, only in a more literal way.
Hope you enjoyed my third post, I thought I’d sign of with a fox fact, Foxes not only have whiskers on their faces they also have them on their legs and ankles which they use as feelers to help them to navigate in the dark.
