The Knife Foxes are Nad Greentail’s pirate crew of miscreants. Many are deserters, drifters, and drudges from seedy corners of the world seeking easy fortune.

When not arguing with their self-appointed Tanuki Captain, they bumble around, hoping to catch victims unaware with their knives.

In this blog post, I talk about the long process drawing these knife fox bandits from paper to digital screen!

Here’s a timelapse video of my entire process with Music by Fairlight – StarTropics “Test of Island Courage” OC ReMix

This illustration first started back in October of 2023 as a collection of sketches I made in my tiny sketchbooks. The foxes are enemy characters that are for the game I’ve developing, Blackmask. I had no big story or character with them because there generic grunts.

There are designs I flipped through and had trouble settling on for the months I was spending working on the Blackmask. Starting from an initial chibi design and a taller design in my regular art style. I admit, I’m still not 100% happy with the curent designs for not having a “flair” that I see from other character designs.

The Fox Archers were supposed to be in the original illustration, but I didn’t scan their line art before coloring them in marker. I’m interested in making a new drawing with those foxes.

After scanning them, I imported the line art in Clip Studio Paint and rearranged them is some sort of composition that looks interesting. The knives in their hands are the emphasis, so I needed set them up so the hands are visible in some way.

Using my typical methods of editing my ink art, I converted my line art into transparent layers that I could color to make the lines not as harsh in black. If I remember right, I started flat coloring these character in Procreate before I lost my iPad and then my momentum and motivation to work on this piece.

I touched on this illustration on and off because I was too precious about how I was doing it. Perhaps I wanted to give the foxes some fur colors more distinct than them all being orange and leaving it. Even then, I was fighting with myself about whether to leave the flaws in my line art intact or edit them out.

In the middle of flat coloring, I was bothered by them not having an interesting background. I forced myself to create any suggestion of background to put a place on these foxes.

Glad I committed to getting this done. I keep lose focus on illustrated pieces, so it’s good to get art done when I have the will. There’s other thumbnails, layouts, and sketches all over my computer, so I want to find one that will get me excited to work on.