I'm a bit behind with my blog posts! I've been working to get some new prints completed for a 2026 calendar. It's crazy how far ahead these things are planned. Anyway, the images have been sent off and it's time to catch up on some other tasks.
A while ago a friend who is a good wildlife photographer posted a picture of a fox in the rain. I'm not the greatest or most patient of wildlife photographers and I'm happy to use others source material but it's important to acknowledge it when you do... So thank you very much Dutch.
Anyway, it brought me back to an idea I'd had a few months previously when working on the print of the Bluebell Fox, when I saw a fox (probably the same one!) in the rain by a stream on another rotten day. The acceptance that whatever the weather might throw at you, you've just got to get on with things!
There have been no shortage of cold, stormy and rainy days this year, so I spent some time up on the mountainside where I had originally seen my fox, taking some photographs and researching for the final composition.
Around the same time St. Cuthberts Mill had asked me to try out some of their nice Bockingford paper. I made a short video about how I like to use watercolour, pen and pencil to record some of the fallen trees on the mountainside, to put on Instagram. It shows how lovely our spring weather can be!
As usual I made the design in blue acrylic paint onto some thin paper. these jpegs show a bit of the progression of the idea from the first rough sketch. you can see I've changed the position of the body of the fox as it steps off the rock. I thought the angle would intersect and counteract those slashes of rain.
I've used this way of showing rain falling before. It's not my invention. I have been influenced (as have many other artists) by Japanese woodcuts. The first two prints here are by Utagawa Hiroshige, the last is a painting by Van Gogh, Rain at Auvers (yes he was very influenced by Japanese prints).
Kingfisher, Evening Rain
I've mostly used lines lighter than the background, as if the rain is catching the light as it falls. This also allows me to use the slashes of rain to divide up the surface of the print into sections, with open, unprinted paper between them.
Here are a couple of videos of the making of the print.
The first one is just a mix of bits of the process.
The second shows the stages of the design and then the six different layers of cutting and printing.
The lino cut and ready for the 4th layer of printing.
I've ended up with 30 prints in the edition and four proofs that fall outside the usual slightly varied range of colours. Even within the edition there are varied levels of blues, greens and greys. It's because of this that I always list my prints in my shop (attached to my website) separately so that buyers get to choose a specific print.
this now makes four of these large fox reduction prints completed. The other three are 'Winter Fox', Vulpecula (the autumnal one) and The Bluebell Fox.
All are 36x60cm, image size, and use 5 or 6 layers of printing. I've almost illustrated the four seasons up in the valley under Craig y Cilau on Mynydd Llangatwg, if you accept it rains a lot in the summer!Â
I feel like a project is over, at least for now but there may actually be a sunny fox one day.
There's more info on how the other three were printed in other entries in my blog
Bluebell wood Fox
Winter Fox
Vulpecula
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