I'd like to thank you all for your kind words and support.
Yesterday our Benevolent Lord (ATTENTION!) Virmir (At ease!) suggested that I should try a full body drawing this time. So I tried... I worked long and hard... blast, you wouldn't believe how my arm and paw ache... and this is the semi-final result of my efforts.
Reference photo originally from The Sitting Fox blog.Why "semi"? Well, it's not even shaded. Still, it was exhausting and long work. (And I believe that anyone having the slightest bit of drawing skill would do it in less than 20 minutes.)
(12:43:04) Tvorsk: Well, by "painful" I meant more the "mental" pain - drawing some fragment 30 times, trying to make it at lest remotely resemble the reference pic.
(12:44:33) Tvorsk: Tho, frankly, my wrist and elbow "remind me of their existence", so to speak.
(12:45:21) Tvorsk: And you know how after 2-3 redrawings that specific location on paper becomes hard to draw on...
(12:48:23) Tvorsk: Near the end my hands were sweaty and shaking... *sigh*
Now... what was my largest problem? Well, our sketchy friend is 2.7cm (just over an inch) tall, and 7.75cm (just over 3 inches) long. Working with pencil and eraser on such small (is it?) scale is very hard - at least to me. I'm planning to go to a mall today, maybe I'll find a nice A5-sized sketchpad that I could afford without selling my tail to pawn shop... but I'm definitely going to avoid "long" drawings until I'll have something larger than a 10x10cm square to draw on.
I was quite happy of the yesterday's "poor fox's light box" of a black fox silhouette being barely but just enough visible through the paper and allowing me to compare my outlines with the original. Of course, I still managed to make a ton of mistakes - some of them could be avoided the paper would have to be perfectly aligned each time, and, as you guess, it wasn't. Rest were just my own faults. Still with me? How nice of you. Tell me on the chat that you had read this part and you'll get a cookie. So anyway, today's photo wasn't so contrasty. Because of that, I spent quite a bit of time (about a hour, I think? I'm sloooowww...) mouse-tracing the fox's outline with a fine white pen in SAI. I believe I already said that the stabilizer and freely editable vector lines are the best thing since tea bags and sliced bread? Well, in any case I said it now. The white line trick worked quite nicely, tho holding the drawing card and a paper towel (Yes, my hands were THAT sweaty when I was re-drawing the head repeatedly) against a soft, fragile, vertical LCD screen wasn't very comfortable.
* Tvorsk sighs.
Sorry for that wall o'text, but I wanted to throw it all out. Thanks for bearing with me, I feel better now.
Oh, also, I credited sources of the ref pics in all preceding posts - check the links out, there's more cool fox photos in there!