Animal Drawing - Fur Lecture

Welcome back. Rendering fur is the icing part of drawing that everybody can't wait to do but if you jump right in to the process of rendering you can run into a whole host of problems with a big one being having your model wander off while you are trying to figure out just where to lay in your shadows.

Before you commit to "furring" your animal, understand not only the forms under it but also how the fur flows around those forms.

As always, let's start with simple gesture and construction for a gorilla.
With proper attention to forms (and ignoring the fur for now) you get your generic hairless simian which looks pretty weird.
But before you freak out and start just drawing hair that looks spaghetti find the flow of the fur/hair. Above I have plotted out paths of the fur as it travels around and down the limbs, getting compressed at lower joints like the wrists and ankles. Note also how, on this animal, the fur appears to come out off the shoulder and "pour" down the upper arm and doing it again at the start of the forearm. gravity always effects the hair/fur and pulls it downward. The longer the hair, more it flows or cascades like water down to meet with the ground.
Here, I have simplified the masses of the fur. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DRAW EVERY HAIR! In fact you shouldn't, always simplify - if you don't you'll take your first steps toward making "fur" that looks and acts more like spaghetti than fur. Character designers and animators work in this style because, really, drawing hair over and over or worse, animating it is a tedious process. To really think about a shadow pass, reconsider the volumes you have created and plot how the light will hit each of these as single elements and combined. A shadow pass should appear controlled but suggests flow while still describing the under lying volumes.

If you plan on doing a single image, follow the steps above, but now you can pull out the hair shapes, but still keep it simple. Always, ALWAYS follow the flow of the fur. Don't just start cross-rendering just because you're feeling lazy. Your finished product look terrible. Attention to detail is key here.
A finished gorilla with attention to construction and how the fur is flowing around them. The fur on the back of the animal is much shorter than the on the shoulders and especially the forearms. You can see in the simplified drawings how much more form is being shown in these areas and how the attention shifts to the hair in the shoulders and forearms.

Let's try an lighter animal. Not light as in weight, but in value because these animals are heavy and...anyway, below is the gesture and simple construction of a polar bear.
I'm making it solid with some anatomy as shown below.
Now that all of that is down, we're ready to render.
The simplified version for animation with slightly larger eye and brows for expression. Very little hair "looking" and more about volume here.
A rendered version, staying in touch with the volumes all of that long white (actually, it's clear but that is another blog post) hair is 'flowing' around. Be sure not to over render, it's pretty easy to loose track of where you are and start plunking down rendered hair any where. if white fur is being hit by direct light leave it white. If it's in shadow, think about a middle grey for the darkest park. Otherwise it'll get too dark- "The lighter you keep it, the longer you keep, the better off you'll be." More on stripes, spots, wrinkles, and other stuff soon but until then, here's an oldie.