In Progress - Channel Island Fox

For a new Guild of Natural Science Illustrators show coming up, I've decided to do a few new pieces. I took some pretty good reference yesterday of the Channel Island Fox at Coyote Point, so I thought I'd do something with him.

I used two pictures combined for reference. I liked the pose of the first one, but I liked the head of the second. I put them together with Photoshop and created this sketch:

I transferred the image with transfer paper to a piece of Masonite board with colored paper pasted to it with matte medium, (color paper is something I like to use with gouache, I could do a step by step on here some time on how I put it on the board so it doesn't warp during painting, but it is fairly simple to do).

I took pictures pretty late into painting, so I have a lot done already. The way I work on this surface is a process of starting with lights, and alternating between that and adding in darks and colors. I think I prefer starting with lights because it gives me a better sense of the shape and form. The dark paper is great because you can let a lot of it show through. Idealy, I probably would have wanted a slightly lighter paper for this subject, considering Island foxes are diurnal as opposed to nocternal (they are awake during the day), but I had this board prepared already so I thought I'd just go for it and see how it goes. So this is all I have so far, and I'll send updates on it as I go along.