Introduction
I’ve painted animals with short, long, curly and wet fur. It is a good time for me to organize what I’ve learned and put things together. I hope this information would help you painting/drawing furry animals.
Dry fur
Here is my cat model, Naomi. As what you can see in this photo, she has short fur on her face and long fur on her body.
Under dry condition, short fur can be illustrated as short strokes as shown below. Meanwhile, long fur can be illustrated as long and smooth strokes. Animal’s fur is not a thin layer, it is usually thick and has multiple layers. Therefore, there will be shadows and gaps between each layer or each cluster.
Fur has direction too. It usually follows body movement or separated by joint movement. For example, when Naomi is turning her head, her cheek fur will not be the same direction as her neck fur.
Wet fur
This polar bear in photo is wet. You can see the difference between dry polar bear and wet polar bear. When fur is wet, it forms many clusters. In this case, you wouldn’t observe many single hair. All hair is grouped. These little groups form a fish scales like formation. But still has layers and gaps that create shadow.
Wavy/Curly fur
Curly or wavy fur maybe a little difficult because it seems so random. However, if you look closely, it is just dry curved long coat goes all direction. Because the fur will go every direction, its shadow and gaps can be everywhere. But the major shadow or gaps should follow the animals body movement.
Above picture is an simple stroke illustration for curly/wavy fur. The fur cluster is cutting off each other and makes irregular void space.
Painting example
Here are some examples from my animal oil paintings. You can see the different brush stroke for dry short, long, curly and wet fur.
Summary
One animal can have all types of fur that mentioned before. For example, a tiger walks in shallow water. It has partially dry and partially wet fur. Short fur around tiger’s nose and long fur around tigers cheek. So there is no “one type of fur for one entire animal”. It is always changing, depends on the animals’ movement and surroundings.
I hope you enjoy this post.
Thank you.