Al's Photoshop TutorialAdvanced Concepts

Advanced Concept: Detailed Surfaces
Part 6: Transparent Fur

This technique is good for any fur you want that doesn't have a toony outline around it. So, how do you make thick, properly transparent fur? Why, you grow it, of course. To the right, you can see I've made turned on the sketch so I can see where the planned limits to the ear are, and have placed a seeding area along the side of the ear, that has been swept with a black airbrush as well for a little variance. This is on a new layer up above all the others.

Now we get a good, thick multi-point brush and start dragging the hair out with the smudge tool, just like the other fur textures we've been doing, but with "Preserve Transparency" turned off so it drags out into new areas. It sometimes helps, for thicker fur, to keep a duplicate layer of your seeding area so you can do more passes, and also once you have some fur growing the way you want, to duplicate and re-merge the layer with the fur on it to make it more visible.

Here, I've used a new layer to add a base color with the airbrush behind the denser fur, so it looks really thick. I've also gone over the fur layer in "Preserve Transparency" mode to give it some texture.

Now it's just a matter of repeating the process for the other parts of the ears, and erasing the stuff that overlaps improperly.


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