Irkencat showed me a link to a tutorial on fur texture, and I wanted to show her an example of how I texture fur, since the way I do it is a bit simpler, but gives results not quite as pretty. On the other hand, it's less likely to give you carpel tunnel.

What you do is draw patches of color, much like in the first tutorial, but you only smudge brush where the color patches meet. This gives a slightly more cartoony look, but is significantly less hard on the hands. I also use a semi-transparent white for my highlite fur whisps, and use an erasure brush at about 20-30 percent to soften and blur my highlited fur whisps a bit.