Playing Arcticfox: A drawing inspired by reminiscing about a computer game

The prompts for this week in @opheliafu's Doodle Doodledayeo are Cold, Clever, Fox.

The connection that immediately jumped out for me from those words is Cold + Fox = Arctic Fox. But for me, the strongest link I have to the idea of arctic foxes isn't the animal, it's to the video game. When I was a kid my dad worked at AT&T and a lot of my early computer gaming was done on the AT&T 6300 that he brought home for us (The AT&T 6300 was what was known in those days as an “IBM PC compatible”). He also had a friend at work who was into games and he would bring home copies that I would play. One of the coolest games that I recall was Arcticfox, which had a polygonal-tank theme reminiscent of the arcade classic Battlezone but was more mission-oriented and strategic rather than being an arcade-y shooter. (I don't know if I played the game on that computer or a different one, a lot blends together when looked at through the mists of time).

And since we're being nostalgic for things from my childhood, Cold also connects with the fact that I loved playing in the snow as a kid. You would get off from school and we had a great hill for sledding in my back yard, what's not to like?

So, with the ideas “playing Arcticfox” and “playing in the snow” in my head I knew exactly what I wanted to draw: a red fox that's clever enough to play computer games playing Arcticfox in the snow.

I'm not much of an artist, or at least I don't have much formal training, but I know that reference material helps, so I brought these images up on my computer to help guide my drawing:

A red fox

A screenshot of Arcticfox

An AT&T 6300

There's no formal rule for what counts as a doodle for Doodle Doodledayeo, but over the process of doing a few I've settled into a definition I'm comfortable with: A pencil drawing without any pre-planned or practiced elements and without much (if any) digital touching-up. One practical effect of that is that I try to avoid too much erasing, because the things I normally do to get rid of erased lines when I scan pencil drawings feel like they're taking it away from doodle territory. However, an idea I came up with for my banana-fairy doodle was that I could sketch out some of the geometry/composition on one sheet of paper and have that underneath my drawing paper as a guide for my main doodle.

And with that guide (which, being honest with myself, is probably a bit more detailed than I originally intended) I created my final doodle:

I'm not sure the fox totally reads as “fox”, but it's probably at least in the canine family, and I think I landed in the ballpark of the overall effect I was trying to achieve with the image. However, regardless of the end product, I quite enjoyed the trip down memory lane to reminisce about my dad and one of the games I used to enjoy when I was young.