The firefox quickly bounded across the water, never paying any mind to the reflection below. It knew quite well what the sky above looked like; after all, was there a better way to announce his arrival to the next village over than a light show? The bells on his tail seemed to disagree.

I created this piece for the Character Design Challenge for the month of November, in which the theme was “Fox Adventurer”. It was my first time submitting for the challenge and my first time documenting the process of creating the character. All of the design process was done in Procreate, and the final piece after the colored concept sketch was done using only brushes from the Airbrushes.

I started thinking that I wanted to do something with a bat-eared fox to try and stand out, and I thought it would be interesting to try and go down the route of having the fox be a magic user. However I quickly grew frustrated with the idea and found myself looking at the firefox stickers I had created a few months back based on the Finnish folklore of the firefox. In my mind, a perfect job for a firefox that was adventuring (or rather, the reason why the firefox would be adventuring in the first place) would be to deliver messages to people in a world that is not ruled my technology such as cellphones and computers. I also wanted to keep the fox as a quadreped instead of a bipedal more human-like character because I figured travel would be much quicker that way.

I thought it would be fitting for a fox adventurer to be ferrying scrolls back and forth and thought a little harness would be fitting. The pouch is for payment of its services, although in my mind it would also accept some food and shelter for the night as payment rendered. The bells and bow were designed with the thought of how to represent the way it interacts with others, and I wanted to make the fox look approachable, as though even a little girl wouldn’t hesitate to go near it and decorate its tail.

This design was a lot of fun, and I strongly believe that I will do more with this character in the future.