Hi there!

This is a bit of a unique picture for me - no story this time, just a little fur practice that I thought was good enough to post.

I've always strived to be better with my art - expanding to new horizons, new levels of detail, realism and emotion in what I do. It always makes me smile seeing how far I've come - almost as much as I cringe when looking at the oldest stuff too. My gods :P

Either way, though, I feel like I've been stagnating recently. Compared to the improvements I made in previous years, I feel I reached a level in late 2014/early 2015, and have come to a plateau since then (or at least a very shallow slope). While I still feel I've made improvements in lighting and general composition, and my improvements in writing and other styles I'm still most pleased with, I've been disatisfied with how much better my main art's become from a technical standpoint.

I think the main reason for this is the technique. I frequently use an ungodly number of layers, tens of layer masks, and frequently try to combine shadows and texture on the same layer - all of which has left the end result of my pieces a convoluted mess when looking at individual layers. I might be happy with the end result, but large-scale changes are tough to implement.

So, finally able to do my won work and motivated to experiment, I pulled up a bunch of fur pictures and tutorials - and this is the end result!

I gotta say, I am very pleased with how this came out. It didn't even take that long, and the techniques I've gleaned from just this piece are going to serve me well. I've already applied this technique on a picture or two still to be released, and I'm very much still learning, but I'm very happy with how it's going so far and I hope to develop some lovely stuff as I keep going.

What about you? How do you think this style looks so far? Any benefits over my older stuff, anything that the older stuff did better? Leave a comment, let me know what you think! ^^

And, as always -

Enjoy :3

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Major thanks to Witherlings who provided an excellent fur tutorial, which formed the backbone of this project!

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