W. Brown's "Foxy" character has special significance to my evolution as a "manga" style artist. Way back in the late fall/early winter of 1998, I was beginning to discover this wonderful form of artwork. Back then I pretty much just drew two-dimensional war vehicle schematics. When I installed AOL version 2.5 on my 386 computer however, a new world was opened to me. I started browsing through the AOL freeware/shareware library which contained thousands upon thousands of files- everything from QBasic source code to anime artwork.
In this library, (which still exists but AOL is doing it's best to hide it) I discovered a drawing of Felicia the Catwoman from Capcom's Darkstalkers. I had remembered her from playing the video game years before and decided I really liked the style of artwork she was drawn in. I decided I would look for more pictures drawn in the same style. As I searched the through all of the cryptic file names I found a "foxy.gif" and opened it's file description. According to the author, W. Brown, this picture was just a quick work of his that he uploaded for everyone's enjoyment.
As it turns out, W. Brown's quick sketch of a girl named Foxy turned out to be a hot as hell fox girl that I immediately saved to my hard drive. That was two computers ago, and I have subsequently copied the image onto the hard drive of each new computer. Her, combined with elements of Felicia and the artwork of Akira Toryama, became the basis of my then fledging manga-ish drawing style. W. Brown's Foxy has had an enormous amount of influence on my work.
Despite the enormous amount of impact she has had on my drawing style, this is the first time I have drawn Foxy. For the longest time I considered her to be far out of the reach of my talent. Just recently have I decided that my own talent had progressed enough to where I could do a worthy representation of her. There were many elements that W. Brown put into Foxy that I found unique, the most significant being her eyes. Her eyes are just so different than what I usually see in the art world, yet striking none the less. I had a difficult time drawing her eyes at first, sending at least one sheet of my good paper and a quarter of a Clickster eraser to the big garbage can in the sky. I also had issues on the exact pose I wanted. Eventually I worked things through and the sexy little fox girl you see above is the result. Her eyes, her shorter hair cut, and her tight waist and broad hips are all drawn with respect given to her original character design. Foxy is just as special to me now as she was three years ago.
Given the great significance the original Foxy drawing had to me I am very eager to see more of W. Brown's work. Unfortunately, I have never seen another piece of work done by him on AOL or the Internet. I tried searching for both his artwork and more pictures of Foxy, but I found none. If anyone has any information on W. Brown or if W. Brown sees this page, feel free to e-mail me because I would love to see more of his work and express my appreciation towards him.
The rough pencil sketch was done on standard college ruled notebook paper with a .05mm mechanical pencil loaded with 2HB lead. It was scanned and cleaned up in Paint Shop Pro 3.11. In the final Foxy drawing, the rough pencil work was done on 80lb. medium surface Strathmore drawing paper with a .05mm mechanical pencil loaded with 5H lead. The pencil lines were darkened with 2B lead. The result was darkened and cleaned up with Paint Shop Pro 3.11 and printed on fax/copy paper. The printout was colored with Crayola colored pencils and the inking was done with Pigma Micron 08 and 03 size pens. The lettering and air-brushing was done with Paint Shop Pro 7.02.
All text and original multimedia is © 2001 Daniel Keller. All other information is copyrighted by their respective owners.