How I Paint Fur Tutorial

Fur is a tricky thing to paint, there is few of types of fur in my opinion; Which consist of the fuzzy kind which is a lot more finer hairs which you see in toys, there is the like groomed dog when which is like bristle and then there is the clumpy like fur with you see on wolfs like around there neck and chest.
In this tutorial I will be only going in to how I paint the clumpy kind, as my last painting required a lot of it.

First off I use a hair like brush which is modified to have some random strands. I'm not entirely sure how to save off just one brush on photoshop rather than a collection, when I figure that out I'll probably post up a link to download.

 This is what the brush roughly looks like. I have it set to pen pressure on for the opacity and size. This is so when I push harder I can get a larger brush size then get lighter when doing the tip of the clump of fur. You don't really want bold colours when doing the tips as most the time the fur sprays out and is slightly fuzzy. The picture to the right is the kind of strokes the brush gives.

For painting the fur ball I simply ran with 5 shades of blue, you will probably end up using a lot more colours when painting fur yourself but, I figured I'd keep things simple.

First off, I find it important to start from the outside in because fur is just layers of hair, its just easier than having to paint back over already placed strands. I've painted in roughly where the light is hitting the ball so I can use it s just as a guide.

I try to use the top 3 tones of blue for this bit to get the shading of the ball right.

So now I've tried to cleaned the fur clumps on so you can see them more clearly and used darker tones near the paint of the clum where most of the light doesn't hit. Also I've started using a smaller sized brush to start adding the high lights using the pale blue then the lighter blue for small areas while trying not to over do it.

Finally I use a larger brush again and set the opacity to 50 percent and paint over the area again on the fur where the light is hitting to make it pop back out and and look like thicker clumps.





I hope this tutorial some what helps if you are struggling on how to start off painting fur. It may not be the perfect way to paint fur but I've seen some really confusing tutorials and I figured it be worth doing one on how I tackled fur.

Coloured Portrait 3

I've always struggled with doing hair and straight in colour and I felt it was time to finally push myself to improve. I used a black and white adjustment layer to keep checking the tones were right. For the fur I had to make a brush to do the fur. It took me a long while to figure it out. I'll probably go through my technique to painting fur at somepoint too. 

Black & White 7 (Oliver Queen/Stephen Amell)

Black & White 6

Black & White 5

Black & White 4

Eye Studies

Coloured Portrait 2 (Learning Subsurface Scattering)

This one I had to again start in black and white. I really struggle on tonal values in colour.  I had had painted this once and posted on Facebook and it seemed to be missing something and that was Subsurface scattering.  This is where the light and shadow meet and the light is absorbed in to the skin and kind makes this red/orange glow that you see commonly in ears and hands when put infront of a bright light.

Using ArtRage and Photoshop

Normally I just use Photoshop and a Wacom Intous 5 but I've always liked using brushes that emulate brush strokes and Artrage seemed perfect for that. I had to paint in black and white first because I'm not too confident about painting straight in to colour. I started this in artrage  but I ran in to issues with it purely just taking too long to go through changing the settings all the time.  I ended up bringing it back in to photoshop to add colours and touch up areas. I really like the brush stroke effects it gave but it grew very tiresome that way of painting. 

Black & White Portrait 3

Black & White Portrait 2

 This one I've tried to focus on giving the eyes the most detail then have the viewers eye spiral around along the hair then on to the top she has on. I think it works well. I also made a Gif of the process of painting it so you can see where the most detail went.

Commission I did of someones baby.

Black & White Portrait

I had a little issue with doing the hair on this one.