My soulmate, WhiteShepherd, wanted to have a nice art piece for his new creation, Furtopia. We talked and sketched and worked on details for about a week and then I started working on the drawing. My first drawing actually looked like a Fennec Fox but this one didn't. I really did enjoy how this one turned out. A 2 year old son of a friend of mine looked at the pic while his mother was looking at it and told her, "Mommy! That is a wolf!" Well, it wasn't supposed to be and another friend, of WhiteShepherd's, told him it looked like a dog. Well, all I can say is that at least it looks like a canine!

I love using the computer now to work with my art pieces, but then they are considered prints and not originals. I will be using the printouts from the computerized creations to finish my originals, so it isn't a total loss.

I sketched out a drawing then brought it into Paint Shop Pro 5 to work with it. I added the special touch, "neon" with Adobe Photoshop 5.


These are the final products.
(Because our printer broke down before I could print out both pieces,
only the "Ghost Fox" (on the left) will be displayed at the AC2002 Art Show.)



This is the original sketch, created on March 30, 2002. I needed a better pic to work with so I 'outlined' the sketch with Paint Shop Pro 5 by using the eraser with the black color.
I ran into a little bit of a problem when I wanted to add color. Since the sketch was 'black & white' I wasn't able to use the colors but, I came up with an idea. I 'erased' the background with a color, it didn't matter which color, any color would do for what I wanted to accomplish. Yes, I know the green is a bit on the bright side but it worked! Now that I had a colored background I could use the color schemes. In this piece here I colored in a part of the body.
Adding more color as I move along and am pleased at how it is turning out. (I love this stuff!) The finishing touches. The eyes and the tongue. Since I am still learning shading etc., it was nice being able to see on the computer how things looked and it was so easy to 'clear' if I didn't like it. I also outlined it darker so that it really stood out.
Now that I had my coloration on the fox I needed to 'erase' the bright green background! I'm sure a lot of furolks will be very thankful! (LOL) Well, I did forget to color in the nose so this pic shows the nose colored in!

"Ghost Fox"
(Original print sold at AC2002)

I took the pic into Adobe Photoshop 5 and wanted to use the 'wand' feature to fill the background with black. I shrieked after I did the fill because almost the whole pic went black! I started laughing and my soulmate, WhiteShepherd looked up from his computer wondering what happened so I told him to come over and take a look at what happened! *I'm not that familiar with Adobe PS5, he is.* I loved the result!

What had happened was I had 'white' as the other fills and when I hit the black fill, there was black outlines around the white so it just thought it was supposed to go there as well! So, in order to be able to get the fox to have its body, and still have a black background, we changed the white to an off-white, which you can see worked well in the next two pics.



While I had the pic in Adobe Photoshop5 I wanted to add something nice and played around with some of the filters. I fell in love with the 'neon' filter and wanted to keep it for this pic.

I then took it back into PSP5 and with the background cleaned out I saved the pic as a .gif so I could make it a transparency. *The thumbnail is still a transparency so the background looks black.* This is the finished product!