WALKTHROUGH: Painting Snowy Fur

EDITING ARIA FROM 2025: I apologize for how small the images in this walkthrough are. When it was first created on my old Patreon, you could right-click to view them larger but that was no longer the case when I retrieved them for this re-upload. I hope it’s still helpful for some despite the issue! <3

Hello Moonbeams,

This month I have a mini walkthrough to show you how I went about painting Ivan the fox's snowy fur in this piece!  This mini walkthrough will actually be a bit more in depth as I took quite a few photos of the fur process on the fox.  Feel free to right click and view them as some of them are larger than what can be seen in the Patreon article. 

Surface: Wood panel with one coat Daniel Smith watercolor ground in Titanium White  and a topcoat of QoR watercolor Ground.

Paint: The fox mainly consisted of my "shadow shade" mixture made of the yellow ochre, prussian blue and violet (all Daniel Smith Brand).  The painting also used Daniel Smith Burgundy Yellow Ochre, Daniel Smith Opera Pink, Daniel Smith Carmine, Daniel Smith Carbazole Violet, and Grumbacher Thalo Blue and  I also played with a sample sheet from Daniel Smith for a few little dots of oranges, yellows and reds. 

Brushes:
Various synthetic brushes including an old, small Black Swan brush of unknown size, Taklon Scrubber brush and  Princeton Velvetouch Spotter brush 12/0, and Princeton Velvetouch Spotter brush 20/0 for the finest detail and Sakura Waterbrush size small.

For this snowy beast I first began by lightly going over my lines and determining the basic fur directions over each major anatomical feature such as muscle and bone definition that I wanted to have present within the painting.

I then put down a wash of my shadow shade, carefully painting around chunks of snow which I determined intuitively as I went.  The key with the snow chunks was to have them going in similar directions to the fur, and keeping with the flow of his anatomy.   For these chunks, I wanted the look of snow that had long settled, forming that kind of crust that snow tends to get after sitting for days as it slightly melts and refreezes.  I also wanted to imagine that perhaps the fox had shifted slightly or begun to breathe, causing the snow chunks to crack apart.  The reason for this was largely for aesthetic as otherwise I could have covered him entirely in white snow, or, just painted a smattering of freckled flakes where the snow had freshly fallen. 

Once I had the shapes of the snow chunks all determined, using an old, very much splayed  12/0 brush, I began to paint individual strands of fur between them going with what was realistic for the directions of the anatomy and how fur lays over a body in real life.  I also kept in mind the way the snow might press and settle against the fur.

Fur on the paws tends to be often be a bit shorter and more subtle on many animals.  I painted in the strands with my splayed 12/0 brush and touched them up with my 20/0 brush before softening them with a barely damp, and very dull brush from Black Swan of an unknown size, but larger than my detail brushes.

For this floof of a tail puff, I thought about the way in which longer sections of fur can sometimes splay out in all directions and wanted to paint that.  You see shapes like this most often in longer fur, particularly on the tail, or the fluffy neck which contains several fur directional changes, or when fur goes over a defined section of muscle or anatomy and is pushed into various directions.  Thinking of these funny shapes as flowers can make them easier to paint as you envision each section of fur like a petal opening outward from the center.  Unlike petals however, the chunks will seldom be all the same shape and size.  Varying the shape of each chunk can add a lot more believability to them! 

For the face, I wanted the fur to transition into skull and started by sketching in the skull's basic shape in paint over my faded pencil lines, and then lightly defining the values with my shadow shade.

I then went over the skull with carmine red and added fur detail around the areas that were still flesh.  The face has many directional changes because it contains so many different planes of anatomy from the complex shapes of the ear to the beautiful muscles around the eye.  It also tends to be a bit fluffier around the cheek area for some creatures, especially those in the caninae family, like this fox!  For the skull itself, I added a lot of unrealistic patterning and definition purely out of artistic pleasure.  The eye was highlighted with a bit of Daniel Smith watercolor ground and as I often mention, be sure if you have a glowing eye or highlight, make it as white as it can be.  I often accidentally smudge my white areas so I either leave them for the end, or touch them up.  I also work on a very textural surface which tends to grey out my whites in scans so I go back in Photoshop and touch them up to keep the integrity of areas that need to be heavily highlighted.  

Finally, to finish out the snow, I took a bit of watercolor ground and added little details here and there.  While I mentioned that I wanted the look of long gathered icy chunks of snow I also knew fresh snow was continuing to fall on him so adding little spots of that between the larger chunks gave it far more personality and interest.

I hope this was helpful!  You know I love painting fur and I feel there are endless things that can be talked about when it comes to portraying it from the various textures to how the wild elements affect it.  Perhaps in the future I will have to do an article about painting wet fur :)

~Aria