Alright, I've had a few people ask me how I paint fur on my characters, so without having a real video tutorial available, I will do my best to explain it here. Also, at the end of this you can find a link to my Livestream page where I have videos showing the start to finish of most of my artwork starting with "Office Antics" and my newer works after that. Be forwarded, they are unedited and several hours long each. Onward to the good stuff.
So, let's pretend the pose and background is already roughly sketched out. From here, I go over the sketch of my character with an inking tool to cleanup the outlines and details. Now, for me, what I call a piece of line art is a still a sketch to others due to the lines not always being completely "jagged-less" if you will. You can see this in my gallery, as I almost always post my line art before I move on to the painting. The reason for this is because I don't use the line art at all in my finished painting. GASP!! Instead, I use it more like a stencil. On a separate layer under the line art, I pick a mid-range of the lightest color. Using a brush with pressure settings off, I lay in a solid color for the whole char. Once the color is down, I zoom in and fill in any missed areas or erase color as necessary so that all is contained within the lines. The line art I usually set to a very low opacity so that I can see through it and paint to the outside edges of the lines, basically making sure the area under the lines get painted. I now choose the color select tool and select the color I just laid down. Next I choose a mid-range of my darker color/colors and paint those in as a solid color. You will see that having the base color selected allows you to just paint the alternate colors on your char and mitigate cleanup except for adjusting the specific color patterns of the fur. This first color layer I usually name "flats". It is very important to keep major additions and changes to the painting on separate layers, and name the accordingly so you know what is on which layer as you progress. This makes correcting errors alot easier later on as you tweaks things here and there. Create a new layer above your flats layer called "shade". This is where we will lay in the basic shadows. Keep in mind the direction and intensity of your light source the whole time you are painting. This is important to achieving a convincing picture and ensures everything looks right. For the shading, I usually select black or a nearly black warm or cool color depending on the overall lighting that will be in the finished picture. The I airbrush the shadows accordingly. Keep in mind that I still have base color selected, therefore the shadows should only appear on your character. Now it will probably look pretty stark an ugly at this point, but don't worry! Adjust the opacity of your shade layer to a percentage that looks good to your eye. It will usually be pretty low, maybe around 30% or so. That's just a rough estimate, but the main thing is to play with the slider until it looks about right to your eye. You can always adjust this more later. Next make another layer called "light". This is where you will lay in your basic highlights. Choose white and just as you did with the shadows, airbrush only the areas getting the most direct light. I set the airbrush opacity fairly low for the highlights so I can gradually buildup the intensity of the areas receiving the most light and smoothly blend it in to the immediate areas of those. Now, it should once again be very stark and almost ugly to look at, but now is where adjust the opacity of this layer to tone things down.TADA!! You should now have a very basic colored character that appears three dimensional due to the depth you have added with the shading and lighting. Phew! That's alot of writing to do on this little phone of mine. I will be back very soon to elaborate further on the next steps. In the mean time, feel free to check out my streaming bids and leave me comments as to how I am doing so far and any questions if I have not been clear enough on something thus far. If this "tutorial" of sorts generates enough interest, I will go into how I compose and paint my backgrounds after I am done explaining painting characters.
