Fox family

For celebrating the arrival of spring, I created an illustration inspired by the beautiful colors and smells of March and April. My illustration is about a fox family. Mama Fox’s birthday is tomorrow, so Papa Fox decided to take the cubs in the woods to gather the most beautiful flowers for their mom. Their mission is to make a big, beautiful bouquet out of spring flowers.

When creating enchanted scenes and characters like this one, I work mostly with watercolor.
Come and create an adorable illustration with me.
Here is what you’ll need:
- any paper for sketching and watercolor paper
- watercolor paint, but you can use gouache or acrylic paint too; the steps are the same
- brushes, water, paper towels, or any piece of fabric to dry your brushes
- pencil, eraser
- masking tape (not essential)
- an iPad with Procreate and an apple pencil (not essential at all, you can easily work without these)

First, you need to decide what to paint. I like to doodle when I’m bored, so I always have some ideas to paint for later. You can simply just think of something you’d like to draw, or if you don’t have any ideas, you can do it my way and just start doodling on a piece of paper. Believe me, there are always some ideas coming once you start! I even create a little story in my head for every illustration, just like for this one you’ve just read.
My first sketches for this painting looked like this:

Once you have a sketch, you need to transfer that image onto your watercolor paper. Of course, you can draw directly on your watercolor paper, but too much erasing and redrawing destroys the paper surface, making it harder to paint on it. That is why I always make some sketches first.
To transfer your sketch to the watercolor paper, you can just try to copy the drawing again. You can even put your sketch on a bright window glass, then put the watercolor paper on top of the sketch. This way, the light will let you see the sketch on your upper paper, so you can easily follow the lines with your pencil.
I personally like to redraw a sketch multiple times. First, I take my messy sketch, I photograph it with my iPad, and I use the app Procreate to draw over the sketch. This way, I can make the lines clearer. I like to make a digital pencil sketch, then draw that again with more definite lines. After this, I print out the final sketch and transfer it to my watercolor paper, using the window copying technique. I know it sounds like a long process, but for me, it’s worth it, but you can easily skip a few steps and just copy your first sketch on the watercolor paper. 😊

So now we have our sketch on this thicker paper, we can start to paint! I like to use masking tape, to secure my paper on some cardboard; this way the painting dries flat and the edges will not curl up. But again, you can skip these if you want, you can just lay your paper on a desk!

Let’s start filling those lines with colors! When using watercolor, I like to paint a base layer, this means that I’m coloring everything with one layer of paint. Then, when it dries, I like to paint at least one other layer on top of that, making the shadows, and painting on all the small details.
Some tips: If you don’t know what colors to use, you can use a little piece of paper for color samples. I’m always using one when figuring out the colors.

Finishing touches! If you don’t have brushes small enough, you can use color pencils to finish an illustration. For this one, I used a graphite pencil to draw the mouth of the foxes. Once you feel like you are done and the paint is dry, you can remove the masking tape (if used any), and that’s it! You just created an illustration on your own!