Creating long hair for animal paintings

Creating dog fur like this, where each strand seemingly merges with another, required some significant deep thinking! How would I give the impression of fluffy mane-like fur that had a life of its own? Well, first I studied my subject very closely and observed a myriad of hues and colours that would need to be blended from my standard set of acrylic paints.

I decided to work in layers as I always do to build texture and depth to each pet portrait but as this was the first time I had taken on a subject with a lot of thick fur I decided to water down my acrylics in the first instance in order to build the shadows and the light carefully. Initially I tried to use a flat brush but I felt that I was not getting anywhere fast with being able to blend the hues and ended up with more of a thin and watery impasto style painting. The areas I did not like very much at all, I actually painted over with white gesso and started again.

Then I dug out my angled flat brush that I had used before with painting trees and looked a little worse for wear! However, I soon found this to be an advantage as where the bristles had slightly splayed, I found I was able to paint unique strands of hair. I was also able to really push my layers of colour into each other. As you can see for instance my lighter brush strokes of Yellow Ochre hues are blending into my deeper Burnt Sienna hues. A little stroke of Mars Black just to push those layers back making it look like there are shadows in the fur and finally in my last layer of paint a little Titanium White mixed with water just to create the wispy highlights at the ends of the strands of fur.

Overall, I think this technique of holding the angled brush against the canvas front the tip of the point and dragging it down and being very free and flowing with the movement of the brush has been highly effective for creating long animal fur. I have been able to almost give the impression of the facial features with it that was maybe more accidental than purposeful in the first instance. But as this had happened with my base layers, the following thicker layers of paint built on those initial structures ultimately creating a seamless link between the facial fur and the rest of the body. I will definitely be trying this again with any future paintings of long haired animals . Patience and layers are the key!