So yeah, sketched this up for a friend real fast and figured someone on here may find it helpful too, so I'll go ahead and post it.

Obviously if you actually try to make it look neater/cleaner than I did for giving him the general idea it will look better, but this should give the basic idea.

This is the method I came up with and used for this image: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3287971/

Makes things easier, though still takes ages, unfortunately can't do much about that. It will always come out looking more natural than a chainmail brush or something though.