This is a very basic form of ambient occlusion.

Don’t think about the position of the light source yet, but rather try to “sculpt” the form of the animal by leaving out the areas that would be darker regardless of the lighting. Pick a brighter version of the previous color and paint over the body parts. You can use any brush for adding this base color. I usually start with dark beige, because most creatures have light colored underside. With the transparency locked, you can draw all over it and you’ll never cross the outline. You can now remove the neon outline-it will not be needed anymore. Name this layer Shadows, and set its Blend Mode to Multiply. With the selection still active, create a New Layer and fill it with white. Name this layer Colors and lock its transparency. Step 5Ĭreate a New Layer and use the Flood Fill Tool to fill the selection with 50% gray. Take the Magic Wand Tool (W) and click the space outside of the outline. Fluffy creatures seem bigger than they really are-try to draw this real outline rather than the seeming one. Take the Inking Pen and draw the outline of the animal using a bright, neon color. Step 3Ĭreate a new layer over the line art. This will help us see all the shades of both light and dark colored fur. Switch the background color to medium grey.

When you’re done, lower the Opacity of the layer to make it visible, yet non distracting. If you want, you can use mine for this exercise, or simply trace the lines from your reference. It doesn’t have to be super clean, but it must include all the important details.

Prepare the Layers Step 1įirst, you need the line art. Please let me know if it works for you, and whether you find it useful or not! 1. I’ll be using Autodesk SketchBook and two brush sets: my Quick Sketch Set that you can download from the SketchBook Extras panel (Window > SketchBook Extras), and a special fur brush set that I’ve created for this tutorial.Īlso, in this tutorial for the first time I’m using a special plugin to better show the difference between certain steps. In this tutorial I’ll show you my method of painting fluffy fur.

Autodesk sketchbook brushes