Fosse Foxes Part 3- The Process of Painting 34 larger than life Fibreglass foxes
So what is it like to paint 34 larger than life fibreglass foxes? Well it's not your average question, but one we can actually answer (which still pickles our brains).
We first heard about the Fosse Foxes project after being rejected from another opportunity (when one door closes another one opens!). With a key interest of ours being about bringing communities together, when the foxes project came up it seemed like a great fit for us. We were super excited to be working with The Crown Estate, Fosse Park and Blaby District Council and grateful that they were putting their foxes in our enthusiastic hands!
We have written two other blog posts with Part 1 and Part 2 of the Fosse Foxes process, so head on over there to get a bit more context before we jump into the painting...
Colours colours colours
Our final colour palette looked something like this.
When navigating 14 different foxes, we were wary of the materials we were going to use when applying the digital 2D designs onto the intimidating fox shapes. We had experience using Valspar paint for previous murals so we went back to trusty B&Q (practically the only other place we’ve been to whilst in lockdown). We tried to keep to a limited colour palette where possible, whilst still making each fox unique and to the liking of the community groups. Then we scanned in the colours using Valspar's online colour matching service which made our lives so much easier!
We struggled to colour match a few colours to Valspar's existing colour palette so had to take in a Whiskers cat food box, Sainsburys bag for life and Nandos sauce label to try and colour pick the right shades of purple and orange. Explaining to the B&Q employee why we needed 14 tester pots of varying colours was an interesting conversation but they were happy to have a hand in the process of getting the foxes to their final look. ‘Look mum I mixed the paint that's on that great whopping fox sculpture in our local shopping centre!’.
A design sent in from New Lubbesthorpe Primary School
Equipment
Equipment wise the list looked like this:
-Brushes of varying sizes- flat headed brushes were our saviour for corners.
-Good old reliable Posca Pens for details such as our signature on each fox.
-Frog Tape for some of the straight lines (Although this was hard to sometimes wrap around certain parts of the fox!)
-Cif- Ah the blessed Cif. Perfect for scrubbing any mistakes (what mistakes?) that we made along the way.
-Cotton Buds- again for scrubbing off those mistakes we definitely didn't make...
-Easy on Varnish- Love and hate relationship with this stuff. Amazing for protecting foxes and forgiving to an extent. But, it requires deep cleaning your brushes with horrid solvent and wearing full protection so as to not get any on your skin (Not really sure we want our skin to be anti graffiti…)
Day in the Life
7:30am- Get up and go down for brekkie. Breakfast fuel of choice for painting foxes is yogurt, granola, banana and a splodge of peanut butter if we felt like it. Pancakes on the weekend is a must!
7:45am- GET THAT HEATER ON- Need to warm up the conservatory as we were painting mostly in January and it got a bit chilly to say the least.
7:50- Set up a GoPro to get some timelapse footage.
8am- Fox painting begins. Rotating between getting new designs onto foxes, first and second coats and then finishing off the details. We didn't really have a set order, just painted what we fancied at the time.
12:30pm- Lunchtime! Could be a poached egg on toast, jacket potato or a pickle classic fish finger sandwich. Also a mandatory stroke of a cat and a good stretch of the legs round the garden!
1:30pm- Back painting those fox boys. Most definitely accompanied by a podcast or some groovy tunes. Fave podcasts include Elizabeth Day’s ‘How to Fail’ or Dolly Alderton’s ‘Love Stories’.
5pm- See if any of the designs are finished and need to be varnished. We like to do this towards the end of the day so we don’t accidentally knock into the drying foxes!
6pm- A lil workout to keep our bodies moving! Favs are Les Mills or a Yoga With Adrienne
7pm- Dinner- usually something with fish and sweet potato knowing us!
8pm onwards- A film, maybe an episode of Call my Agent or Fargo and a snack, probably microwave popcorn with some chocolate raisins thrown in for good luck!
Below is a selection of behind the scene photos to give a further insight into what a day painting foxes really looks like…
Thanks all for joining us on this mad fox journey! It’s been a very steep learning curve and we are so thrilled with how the project has come together.
Cheers to never having to carry a giant fox through your house again! Check out our vlog below to see all the behind the scenes goodness!