In which I shade a fox

So, the next step in my foxy embroidery is to decide what's what.  The fox in the background is going to be done in silk shading, and the front fox will be in metallic silver thread.  I'm going to work on the back fox first - the cunning mate. 

I looked at pictures of foxes (and Tessy cat) to get a feel of the direction of fur, and marked that on my fox drawing.  I've been using my Bamboo tablet for this - I find it's easier to work on my computer (I use GIMP for working on images) because I can just erase lines easily, and resize things quickly.  Again, looking at pictures of foxes, I coloured the fur in with six different colours, to show roughly where my silk shading will change colour.

The next stop is to go to one of my craft suppliers in town and have a look at colours of embroidery cotton to use.  I've got a dark blue shiny fabric I want to use as the background (it's the one I used for the shadows in my stalagtites piece), and I'll take that along to hold up to embroidery cottons.  I want the cunning fox to be sandy-silvery - not as sandy as a real fox, but not as silver as the fox in front.