My Fox Collage

Although I've been doing a lot of art lately, I haven't been good at taking photos, so all I have are photos of several finished pieces.

I decided I wanted to do a fox with grapes, so I began by drawing the fox.  After I had the fox I could decide what size piece I would do and constructed the cradled board from 1/4" hardboard and pine strips.

This collage portion presented many challenges.  I tried to use papers that related to my subject, and to add to that stash, I ended up hand-writing Aesop's Fox and Grapes fable in Greek.  It's just to the left of the fox's face.  I also used other text fragments as well as pieces of magazine photos for the collage part.  For the photos, I selected mainly skies and centuries old buildings.

For the final layer of the collage, I added some tissue paper that I stenciled with my own designs.  In this case, they're tapestry look designs of flowers and leaves.  Of course the fox drawing was part of the collage also.  I tinted her with glazes of Golden fluid acrylics.  The word "fyxen" that you can see mid-way between the left edge of the painting and the left edge of the fox means "vixen" in old English.

So far, so good.  But the real trouble came with painting the grapes.  I cut a piece of 1/4" hardboard to paint the grapes on and would later glue it in place at the top of the piece.

I coated the grape piece with Golden Coarse Molding Paste, then painted it with Golden fluid acrylic, aiming for the look of a painting on stucco.  I think I achieved that goal, but I found it difficult to paint on this surface - difficult, but, in the end, worth it.