Drawing Animals: How to Draw Realistic Fur with Colored Pencils

1. Introduction: Color pencils are an amazing medium for drawing highly detailed objects. They can be really good if you're wanting to draw some stunning animals. It can seem a little bit overwhelming the idea of how to build up particularly, the fur texture. I want to show you today that with just three simple steps you can draw any fur. If you follow my formula, you'll see that it's really not as complicated as you would think. [MUSIC] My name is Gemma Chambers, and I've been making online art tutorials since 2020. I have helped thousands of people improve their art, and that is what I am passionate about. I truly believe anyone can learn to draw. In this course, I am particularly focusing on how to draw fur. I'll show you all of the materials you'll need, as well as the basic pencil techniques you'll also have to master. From that, I'll show you the full process of how to draw fur, and then we can have a little practice while drawing this swatch. We can then finish this class by drawing this very sweet sleepy mouse. Let's get started. 2. Class Project - Drawing a Mouse: The class project will be to draw this little mouse. Now I've picked him for a couple of reasons. Partly because he looks really sweet. I think it's just a really nice drawing. But also because frequently when you're drawing fur, you tend to be doing something quite big. It can take a very long time, but this mouse didn't take huge amounts of time. It's certainly a much faster drawing if you want to practice fur. Now, I will talk you through everything you need to know to create this little mouse, including how to select colors, how to build up the texture, and I'll show you how to do things like make the sketch outlines. If you do get stuck with this sketch though, I have included some sketch outlines in the class resources, so you could always use those instead. Let's talk about the materials that you'll need. 3. Materials for Drawing Fur with Colored Pencil: Let's talk about some of the materials you will need to draw fur and complete this course. Now the most obvious material that you will need is some color pencils. There's a whole array of different color pencils that you could use for this. I generally either use Polychromos pencils or Prismacolor pencils. That said, it's completely up to you what you use. I do find that you can make some very nice art with Crayola, for example. The only thing to bear in mind if you're not using professional color pencils is that over time, the colors might fade if you leave the drawings in full sunlight, for example. If you put the drawing up on the wall. But I'm talking about over a series of years. It's not something I would worry too much about. For this course, I'll be using Polychromos pencils. Now what's more important in my opinion than pencils is the paper that you're drawing on. As I always say, you can make a much better drawing using pencils like Crayola on the right paper than you can using Polychromos pencils on the wrong paper. You're not going to want to use something like printer paper or sketch paper, I always like using Bristol Board paper. I find that it's very nice and smooth, so really easy to control the pencil, but also you're able to build up a lot of colors, so we're able to build up a lot of the texture, which is obviously our main focus in this course. Next up, you'll need a pencil sharpener. I always use the Swordfish pencil sharpener, but you don't need one this big, something like this will be perfectly fine. As long as it gives your pencils and nice sharp point, that's what's particularly important. The next thing that I use specifically for fur is a craft knife like this. Now you don't have to have this, this is a optional extra. I will use it when I'm drawing the little mouse as well as when I'm drawing the practice swatch. Although I do think it makes a difference to the drawing, I wouldn't worry too much if you don't have one. You can certainly make a very nice drawing of a mouse without it. The next material you'll particularly need is something you need to make, it's not something you can buy. You need to make some color swatches. Now one thing I found is that the color of each pencil doesn't necessarily match the barrel of the pencil or the lead, to be honest, which isn't very helpful when it comes to selecting colors. What I like to do is draw out a grid. Every time I get a new set of pencils, I draw out all of the colors, so then I can see what they actually look like. I always make sure that I draw them on the paper that I will use. In my case, that would be Bristol Board, and I can see what each pencil looks like on the actual paper that I'll end up using. I don't need to rely on things like the barrel. Now, all I'm doing here is taking each pencil going from as light as I possibly can to as dark as I can. Then I can see the full range for each one. I want to make sure I label it so I know which one's which. Generally speaking, my swatches look like this. You don't have to do them as neatly as this, really all you want is to be able to see what they look like. Don't worry thinking that you have to do this all the time. I don't update my swatches very often. I find that they last for years. Although it is a little bit of a time-consuming job, it's not a frequent job and it is so worth it. Now the last material that you particularly need is very important, but again not something you will necessarily need to buy. Whenever I'm drawing anything, I always work from a reference photo. I find that it is the best way to end up with a realistic drawing. You need some way of looking at that reference photo. I generally use my iPad to do this. I can open it on the iPad. I can then zoom in if I need to. I find it's the most comfortable way of working. You could equally use your phone or you could print out the picture and look at it that way. It's completely up to you, but you just want some way of looking at the reference photo. The materials you'll need are color pencils, the right kind of paper, a pencil sharpener, a craft knife is an optional extra but you definitely want to make swatches, and you'll need some way of looking at the reference photo. Now in the next lesson, let's talk about some of the basic pencil techniques you'll need to know. 4. The Key Basic Pencil Techniques: In this lesson, I want to cover some of the basic pencil techniques that you need to know to draw fur. But before we cover those, let's briefly talk about a very important fundamental technique. I'm talking about layering. All color pencil drawings are created through layering. This is where you gradually build up all of the different colors and the texture rather than just going and really hard with the pencil. When you think about painting for example, all mixing of colors happens on a pallet and then you put it on your canvas. But you can't do that with color pencils. So by gradually building up all of the different colors, you're able to mix colors together. You're able to add one texture on top of another, and this is how you build up the picture. Now I do go into this in quite a bit more detail on my beginner's guide for colored pencils. So if you haven't seen that class, do have a look. But essentially what we want to be doing is gradually building up the color and the texture, working very lightly in what's called layers. Now, as far as the actual pencil strokes that I'll be using in this tutorial, there's really two main ones I use. The first is circular motions. So rather than just scribbling back-and-forth with the pencil, which creates a very harsh, not a very smooth texture. I work in circles or maybe more like oval motions pressing extremely lightly. This gives me a really nice, smooth, consistent color. I essentially don't want to see any of the pencil strokes. Now do have a bit of a practice of doing this. I recommend starting slowly and gradually speeding up. The most important thing to do here beyond working in the oval motions is to hold the pencil further back than you would imagine. You'll notice that I'm holding the pencil roughly halfway down the barrel because the other very important thing that I'm doing here is pressing very lightly. If I hold the pencil back here, it stops me from being able to press too hard. You can obviously still press lightly with the pencil when you hold it further towards the tip. You just need to have a bit more pencil control. I just find it easier to hold it further back. Whenever I say that I'm working in circular motions, this is what I mean. The other main pencil technique that I use is flicking motions. So this is what I'll use to actually build up the fair texture. Now you'll notice that what I'm doing here is just very gently brushing the pencil against the paper. I don't want to be applying a lot of force because I'll end up with really chunky lines and that's not what I'm going for. I just wanted to very lightly brush my pencil against the paper. It's almost again like I'm working in circular motions, but like this rather than like this. Again, it is worth practicing. This is such an important motion to master. Now you're going to make your life far easier when doing this if you make sure that you have a sharp pencil. Without a sharp pencil you're just going to make really chunky lines. You're not going to make really nice, delicate lines. The final techniques that I'll mention later on in this course is using the craft knife. Now as I said, this is very much an optional step. I generally use the craft knife to scrape away some of the top layers of color pencil. I do find it creates a reasonably subtle effect, and what I'm wanting to do here is I want to be very careful with the craft knife. I don't want to risk damaging the paper. So again, just very gently want to scrape the craft knife against the paper, just removing the very top layers of pencil. I'm not at all pressing hard. If anything it's better to do this too lightly and then you can always go back a little bit harder if you need to. But honestly, I'm not applying any pressure here. Now again, I would practice doing this before using this on a final drawing. You wouldn't want to put loads of work into drawing and then be unhappy with how the craft knife section looks. So those are the three main techniques that you're going to see me using throughout this course, the most important being working in circular motions and working in flicking motions. Now in the next lesson, I want to cover the general process that I always use whenever I'm drawing fur. 5. The Process: Now let's talk about the general process that I use to draw fur, because I always follow the same three steps. First up, I always start by putting down some base layers. I don't like to get straight in there with adding texture. I like to look at my reference photo and look beyond that texture. You'll notice that there are underlying colors underneath the fur. I want to start off by initially adding those in. Now what I like to do is start at the lighter colors and gradually work my way towards the darker colors. My main goal is to make this as smooth as possible. With that first very lightest color that I can see in the reference photo, I want to be using those circular motions. I want to be pressing very lightly, I want to be holding the pencil quite far back so that I can't press too hard and I want to put down a very smooth even coverage of the lightest color. I then look for the next darkest color. Again, everywhere where I can see this color, I use those circular motions to put down that color in a very smooth and even way. I then keep working from that lightest to the darkest until I've built out something that looks roughly like this. This does look like a mouse, but obviously, it's got no texture. It looks a little bit bold. It's once I got to this point that I want to start building up some of the texture. I can once again work through those same colors, but this time using flicking motions. It's not a case of trying to build up the fair texture all in one go, I'm really letting all of the colors work together to gradually build up the texture. Now there's a few main things that I'm looking for when I'm building fur texture. Firstly, on my reference photo, I want to be really paying attention to the direction of the fur. If I want this to look realistic, I don't want to draw all of the fur going in the same direction necessarily. I want to notice which direction the fur is actually going in and replicate that as best I can. I also want to particularly pay attention to the length of the fur. When you're drawing fur it's not all necessarily the same length. My main example that I always think of here is if you were drawing a cat's face, for example, the fur in-between the eyes is always much, much shorter than the fur on other areas of the face. If you're wanting to draw shorter fur, you need to make much shorter flicks with the pencil. Longer fur you need to make longer flicks with the pencil. But it is still always that same flicking motion. Once I've then gone through and built up all of that fur texture, I find at this point is looking far more like I would like it to. But generally speaking, it looks a little bit scratchy. You also find that maybe some of the colors don't look quite vibrant enough. It's generally not matching the reference photo quite as well as I would like it to. At this point, I like to go back over the top of all of this fur texture, once again, using those circular motions. This doesn't get rid of all of the fur texture. It just generally smooths out what's there and you end up with a much softer-looking fur. You could certainly then stop there. Those are the main three steps. The optional fourth step is to use the craft knife. Frequently some of the lightest areas of fur whilst doing these first three steps, sometimes get a little bit lost. What I can do with the craft knife is scrape away those top few layers of pencil to reveal the very earliest base layers that I added at the very beginning, so the lightest color. It's just a good way to put those lightest hairs back in. Now, as I say, I don't think it is absolutely necessary that you do this. It's something that I certainly like to do, but if you don't have a craft knife, I wouldn't worry too much about it. That's the general process that I always use to draw fur. Let's have a little practice by drawing out a swatch. 6. Practice Swatch - Put Down the Base Layers: Let's have a practice of working through these steps to draw a fur before we jump into drawing our mouse. I think it'd be helpful to draw just a swatch of fur. I've selected the forehead of this cat, which seems like a good section to practice. Now I have included the reference photo of this cat in the class resources, both the full cat and the zoomed-in forehead, so you can use that to help you work through. I've also included in the class resources all of the colors that I'll be using in this swatch. Before we start drawing, let's take a minute to have a look at the reference and see what we're actually looking at. The most striking thing about this section of the cat is the marks on top of the cat's head. There's a few very dark, reddy-orange sections working in a line going around here and there's another very prominent one working in a line along here. There's also the same color, I would say, but a little bit less dark, so a bit lighter along here and a little bit along here. Those are the main sections that I need to draw. I'm also noticing while looking at this, that there are some very prominent strands of fur, particularly these lighter ones around here and I'm particularly noticing the direction of this fur. It's not all going in one uniform direction. Along here, these ones are going a little bit more upwards. These ones are going straight across. These hairs down here are slightly tilting downwards. So that's something I'm going to need to think about whilst I'm drawing this. The last main thing that I'm noticing right now is that although this is a ginger cat, the whole section of fur on the top of the cat's head, I wouldn't say is ginger. I can see some areas where it almost looks like there's a hint of quite dark gray, so particularly around here and around here, and a little bit around here. I'm going to want to introduce that as well. Those are the main things that are immediately jumping out at me. Let's start drawing. Now the first thing I want to do whilst drawing is put down some base layers. I don't want to straight away start adding fur texture onto blank paper. Initially, I'm looking for the absolute lightest color I can see within this section I'm drawing. I will say that the lightest color I can see on the reference photo is this area maybe around here. There's some very light fur that looks almost like yellow. I've picked the lightest yellow that I've got in my set. This is the cream pencil and all I'm trying to do is put a very light layer of this pencil over the whole of the square. Now I do want to try and get this as smooth as possible, so I am working in some small circular motions and also to help me press lightly, I'm holding the pencil a little bit further back than I would usually. I'm not holding it right close to the tip. As you can see, this is just giving me something that I can work off of that isn't bright white. You notice that whatever I'm drawing, I always start off by putting down a base layer with the lightest color. Next up, I want to gradually work my way through some of the darker colors. I'm looking for the next darkest color I can see within the reference, I would say that I can see earthy yellow. I can see this in a number of places, particularly around those darker stripes that I mentioned earlier. I'm going to use the dark Naples ocher and I want to use this partly to begin marking out some of the stripes and the shapes I can see. Now we do still want this to be very light, and I still want to be trying to put this down as smoothly as possible, so I'm doing this in exactly the same way as I did with the previous color. Still working in the circular motion, still holding the pencil far back so that I can't press too hard and I can just begin getting some template of the shapes within that reference. There's some areas that I don't want to put a huge amount of color, for example, this area along here where there's these very light strands of fur. I don't want to be putting a lot of this color on those areas because I do generally want to keep them a bit lighter. It's literally just a case of going over the whole of the square, putting this down anywhere where I can see even a hint of this color in the reference. The most part there is a lot of it towards the right-hand side. As I get towards the left, I want to avoid the lighter patches around here. You can see there's some areas I have gone over more than others, so where there's those darker shapes that I mentioned, I've gone over those a few more times to begin to get the idea of marking them in, but I am going to mark them in a bit more authority with the next color. From here, I want to start thinking about the next darkest color I can see in the reference, and I'm thinking now I want to add a earthy, orangey brown, so we're going to add in the burnt ocher. Once again, I want to be putting this anywhere where I can see even a hint of this color and I can see it strongly around, again, these shapes that I've mentioned. This is a good time to be marking in in a much clearer way where these darker shapes are going to go. Now although I am marking them in, I do also want to try and carry on making this as smooth as I can, so I am still using those circular motions and I'm trying to not put too crispy lines on the edge of where I'm putting this color. Notice that towards the top of this area here, I'm making it a little bit of a gradient to smooth it into the more yellow colors. For the purposes that we're drawing this for, I would say I wouldn't worry too much about getting everything in the perfect place. I haven't done a sketch for this, I'm just trying to get things roughly in the right place. It doesn't matter too much. This is really just getting an idea on the method rather than trying to get all of their cat stripes perfectly perfect. I want to mark in those prominent shapes that I mentioned towards the middle and then I can begin marking in this prominent stripped around the bottom. Again, I want to make sure that I've got some nice smooth edges here. You're just going to make it look a little bit nicer when we do start putting fur texture over the top of this. The main thing that I'm thinking about while I'm adding in all of these colors is that I'm looking for the underlying color underneath the fur. I'm not worrying about any of the actual first stripes, I'm trying to look past that. I'm focusing much more on getting the underlying colors right, and it's just going to make everything else look much richer, it's going to be much easier. I can go back in and adjust any other areas. If I think I need to smooth something out a little bit more, I can just go back over it. It's always worth taking a minute to further compare your drawing to the reference and just see if you can find any major differences. Obviously, at this point, we're not wanting it to look perfect, to like a masterpiece. But we do want it to roughly at least look like the same subject matter. From here, I want to move on to the next darkest color and I'm particularly looking at the stripes again and thinking that they need to be a fair bit darker. I'm going to pick a reddish brown. This is the burnt sienna and I'm once again, going to go over these stripes. This is now much easier because I've already marked them in with the previous color. I still want to be doing this in the same way. Though still holding the pencil further back, still using these little circular motions to try and make it smooth. I'm just generally making what I've got here a little bit darker, especially you can see I'm starting off by going over this line along the top in exactly the same way, following exactly the same pattern as I did before. I can then begin looking at some of these stripes below here thinking about if they need to be made a little bit darker. Actually, as I mentioned when I was looking at the reference photo earlier, a lot of the stripes around here are pretty dark. I can go back over these areas as well and then I also want to be going over this stripe towards the bottom. Now we would say that these lines do still need to be made a fair bit darker. The reference on these areas is a lot darker, but that's not necessarily something that I need to worry too much about right now on making them as dark as the reference photo, because I can do a lot of that and deepen the areas down a lot where I'm adding in the fur detail. Now I've gone over all of these areas with this color. I'm finding it a bit easier to see what's missing and actually looking at it, I think that I want to go back to that burnt ocher and go over a few of the areas, particularly around the bottom around here, but I think it's a much stronger orange than what I've got at the moment. Although this is only the base layers, I do want to get it right. It's just going to make my life a bit easier later on. I'm just generally looking at the reference photo again, seeing if there's any areas that have a much more prominent orange to them and I can apply this in the same way that I did before, still working in these circular motions. I'm not worrying about any texture for the whole of this chapter. I want to be working down this section here, where at the moment it's still pretty much that dark Naples ocher color and I want to just darken it down a little bit so that it's closer to the burnt ocher color and I also focus on this area around here, just generally darken down this. You notice that what I'm doing isn't making it look like a masterpiece, but we are still left with a very smooth base that is quite easy to see what needs to go where. It's going to be far easier to build the fur texture over the top because we've got such a good and complicated base. Once I built up a reasonable amount of this color, it's that around this point that I can start to think about adding fur texture. We can do that in the next chapter. 7. Practice Swatch - Build up the Texture: Now I've got a base down, I can begin thinking about adding on some texture. Now I want to be starting working through the same colors I did before, but I'm not going to start with the cream pencil. That's going to be too light to show up. I'm going to start with the dark naples apricot color. All I'm doing here is making flicking motions, just gently brushing the pencil against the paper and I'm particularly wanting to go in the direction of the fur. As I mentioned, the fur isn't all going in the same direction. These pieces of fur, I would say are tilting up. These ones are going straight across, but these ones are going up a little bit. Around here they're going in this direction. Around here they're pointing down, whereas they're pointing up a bit here. I'm just really wanting to look at the reference photo and try and imitate the direction of this fur. The most important thing that I'm doing here is I've got a really nice and sharp pencil. I find that I have to sharpen the pencil relatively frequently, so do be conscious of that. In order to make the really nice, fine stripes that make up the hair or the fur, I do need to make sure that I keep it sharp. Then I can just gently brush and flick the pencil against the paper very, very lightly and it makes some subtle little lines. Now it's good to start with a lighter color and work towards the darker color. Partly, if you're new to doing this, it will mean if you accidentally make some really hard lines or you do something slightly in the wrong place, it doesn't show up too much because it is such a light color. I like doing it even now because if I mark in the direction with a lighter color then it makes my life a lot easier with the dark colors because I've got a pattern to follow. It means I can get a little bit of an idea that what I'm doing does look right before I go in with those much darker colors. The main areas that I've focused on putting this first color is on these lighter sections, these lighter areas towards the left-hand side. I am also going to put this hallway on the whole of the drawing, but it isn't showing up as much on some of these darker areas where I built up a lot of that burnt ocher. But what we're doing here to build up the fur is building up a number of different colors. Once I've added in that first color, I can start moving on to the next color, which is the burnt ocher, and I'm once again doing exactly the same thing. Now, I do want to be looking at the reference photo still. I want to make sure that I'm only putting this color anywhere that is a little bit darker where I can see this color. I'm not going to put a huge amount on this on the lighter areas, for example, but I do want to work my way around here, so around the left-hand side of this section, still making the same flicking motions that I did before, so just brushing the pencil against the paper. It's important to note that I am doing this quite lightly. I don't want to be pushing really hard, putting loads of pressure on the pencil, partly because that will make it far more likely for the lead to snap, which I don't want to happen. But also I'll end up, if I press hard with much thicker lines than I need for drawing fur. I want to have some very nice thin lines, which is partly why I need to make sure that I sharpen my pencil frequently. I'm just going keep working my way around making these flicking motions on all of the more orange-ish areas. Again, this is made easier because, as I said, I've already built up some texture with the first pencil, so I can see a bit better which direction I'm supposed to be going in. Now, another thing that I do really want to be paying attention to while I'm drawing this fur is the length of the fur. Now, I would say that on the top of the cat's head, all of the fur looks pretty much the same length to me. I want to make similar-length flicks throughout. But if I had an area with much shorter fur, so usually on a cat's nose or much longer hair usually around the cat's ears, then I would have to make either shorter or longer flicks with the pencil to imitate that different length of fur. It's also worth bearing in mind that by adding in these flicks, you can make the fur look thicker or thinner. If you put the flicks really close together, the fur is going to look more dense whereas if you put the flicks quite far apart, it's going to look more sparse and look like much thinner fur. Again, I would say the fur on the top of the head looks pretty thick, so I want to be putting these flicks close together, but usually just above the cat's eyes on the edge of the face, the hair gets a bit thinner there on a cat. If I was drawing the full cat, these are some of the things that I would need to bear in mind. I'm going to keep working my way around. As you can see at this point, because we've only built up two colors, it's not looking very interesting or very realistic, but that's fine. Once enough colors have been built up, it will start looking realistic. It's all about building up the layers of the color. Now, before I move on to a different color, now that I've gone over the whole thing, I do think I want to add a few more flicks on this very light area just so, so lightly, just to add a little bit more detail. It's quite hard to see that first lighter color, so I don't want to leave it as just that color. Then I can start thinking about the next darkest color. Working through in exactly the same way as I did before, I'm now moving on to the burnt sienna. Once again, still working through these flicks, I'm looking for some of the darker areas now, so anywhere where I can see a little bit of this darker brown. There are the more obvious areas like around here, as I mentioned before, these very prominent stripes. But then there's some slightly more subtle areas. You can see some brown around this patch here, as well as underneath here. There's quite a few little flicks along this central section. I'm still working from the left-hand side towards the right. I can start off just around the top of this very light section. I'll once again, be making these flicking motions. I do find that the more colors I add in, the easier it is to work out what I should be doing next. Although on the most part I worked my way through the same colors that I added in for my base layers, if I go through and add in all of this color and then I think, oh no, it's really obviously missing bright red, then I would add in the bright red next, still in the same flicking motions rather than very rigidly following what I did for the base layer. I look at it as a rough guide rather than specific rules on how I need to draw the fur. You can see here where I'm going over this darker marking of the cat. Although before this color looked quite dark, adding the flicking motions over the whole of that dark section makes it actually looks a lot lighter, so it means that I'm going to have to add in a much darker brown to generally deepen down that area, something that I wouldn't have known before I put this color on because you can't really 100 percent know how it's going to look until you put the color down. You can see this is gradually beginning to look more like fur texture. All I'm doing is just making these flicking motions, as I say, anywhere where I can see even a little bit of this reddish brown. Although these strips are, I would say a lot darker than this reddish brown, they do have this underlying color, which is why I still want to make sure I go over here. Once I've gone over the whole of the back section, I can then begin just tweaking some of these areas towards the left-hand side to just add a little bit more detail on this left topside. From here I do want to move on to a darker brown now. I'm going to move on to the walnut brown. This is the darkest brown that I have in my set. I once again want to be going over these same areas, but now just the darkest areas where I can see a little bit of this dark brown. I'm using this a fair bit more sparingly than I did with previous colors though. I didn't want to put absolutely loads of this down and then end up realizing that it's too much. It's better to put less down and gradually build it up. As I say, I want to go back over these strips. Maybe it's a little bit darker, but I do want to add the odd strike in-between these sections as well. I think it will look weird if I only put this color on the absolute darkest areas, which follows with the reference because there is the odd dark hair in and amongst some lighter ones on the reference as I pointed out a second ago. Let's also go over this section at the top. You can see that this is really starting to build up some realistic-looking fur, but it is looking a little bit scratchy at this point, which is fine, we can sort that out a bit later. Let's keep working our way through some different colors now. I'm noticing that in the reference there are a lot of areas of a gray. As I mentioned a bit earlier, I can see a little bit of this gray along here, as well as a little bit in this section like this strand here, for example. I can also see some dark gray around here and quite a bit around here is a grayish brown. I also see a little bit over here. We're going to carry on building up all of this fur texture, putting some of this gray anywhere where I can see a little hint of it. I can either put it in quite lightly, pressing extremely lightly with the pencil, or I can press still not hard, but a little bit firmer just to make it a slightly darker gray if I need that, and this makes quite a big difference. It is stopping it from looking quite as flat, it's giving it a bit more color, a bit more interest. I don't want to overdo it though. I wouldn't say that there's absolutely tons of gray within this fur, but I can see a little bit, and so I do want to add it. I carry on working my way in the same way, adding these flicking motions. You can see how much easier it is getting now because everything is already so clearly marked out. I can so clearly see the direction the fur needs to be going in. That way I'm still closely looking at my reference photo. It doesn't feel as pressured, I can be a bit more relaxed with it. Once I built up the gray in all of the areas where I can see a little hint of this, I want to start thinking about which color I particularly think is missing, so comparing my drawing to the reference photo. Now, I would say that the main thing that's missing is particularly on the darker strips. It looks much redder in the reference than what I've got at the moment. I don't want to use a bright red. I just want to use a color that's redder than what I've got at the moment. This isn't a dissimilar color to burnt ocher, this is sanguine. I once again just want to work on these dark areas where I can see some of this color still working in these flicking motions. I want to build up a good amount of texture in this section of the drawing, but I do still want to get the colors accurate, I want to try and get the colors right, and that'll make it easier for me in the next section. Once I've gone over all of these darker areas, building up some of this red in all of the areas that I can see even a hint of it, I again want to start thinking about what is particularly missing. I would say that the colors of the fur still aren't really matching perfectly the color of the reference. I feel like it needs to be made a fair bit more orange. I'm just going to go in one more time with the burnt ocher, build up some more of this color over the top of what I've got. You can see that it is looking a lot like a fur texture now, but I just want to use this to adjust the color a little bit, add a bit more texture in, so still using these flicks going in the same direction that I have been. Just very light little flicks and building up a number of these light little flicks does change the color. Then after doing this, I would say that I am generally happy with how it's looking at this point. We've built our base layers and built up a lot of texture over the top. What I'm particularly noticing at this point is that it is looking a little bit scratchy. What I'm going to want to do in the next chapter is smooth all of this out and finish it off. That is it for this chapter. 8. Practice Swatch - Add the Final Details: Now that all of the fur has been built up, I want to begin thinking about smoothing this all out. So it's looking a little bit scratchy at the moment. I think I can make it look much softer, more like softer fur. So I'm going to start once again with the burnt ocher. I'm basically comparing my drawing to my reference photo and trying to work out what's missing. So initially the main thing that I'm noticing, the main difference is that particularly on the right-hand side, I feel like the drawing needs to be a little more orange. Now I don't want to worry about adding in flicks with the pencil anymore. I don't need to worry about building up the texture. All I'm doing is going back to those circular motions like what I was doing at the very beginning, going back over this. And it's just going to help to fill in the gaps in-between those flicks. It'll help it look much softer. Now every time that I feel like I finished with the color, I then want to take a step back, have another look at the drawing, compare it to the reference and work out which color I think I need to add in next. So from here I want to start to make these strips look a bit more prominent. I feel like they look a lot darker in the reference than what I have at the moment. So I'm going to go back to this reddish brown, and once again using the circular motions, just smooth all of this out. So doing this is not only smoothing out the fur, making it look softer and more fluffy, but it's also just generally making this area a little bit darker, giving the drawing a bit more contrast. So I'm going to work my way around again, looking at any areas that I think would benefit from a little bit of this brown. It's not a massively dark brown, but it is making the areas a little bit darker than they are at the moment. And then from there, I'm wanting to really make these strips like a little bit darker, even darker. So I'm going to go back to that walnut brown. This is the darkest brown that I'm using on this drawing. Going back over these areas, but still with these circular motions and it just generally makes the area pop and look a bit more prominent. You'll notice that going over these areas with these circular motions isn't taking away that fur texture. You can still see that fur texture. It just looks like a smoother more detailed version of that. So once again, from here, I think it's a light orange yellow color that looks particularly missing to me at this point. You'll notice that whereas previously I've generally worked from light to dark, I'm now not working in such a methodical way because I am literally just looking at the reference and trying to work out what the difference is. So I'm not doing that in any particular order. I find that it once I add some reddish brown, then it becomes more apparent that I need to add a darker brown. Once I've done that, then it becomes more apparent that I need to be adding in this color. So I don't think it's something that I can plan ahead so much on like I can work my way up through the colors. So once I've worked my way over the whole of the drawing, adding in this color anywhere where I think it needs brightening up, I then want to start thinking about adding in some of the lighter details. So as I've mentioned before, these light hairs around here, I think are more like the cream color that I put down at the very beginning of the drawing. But because the number of colors have been layered on top of here now, I think that's been a little bit lost. So what I can do is use something called a craft knife and just scrape away some of the layers of pencil to reveal the color that I put down at the very beginning. Now, I can't stress enough here that I am doing this really gently. I'm not applying any pressure to the paper whatsoever because I don't want to risk damaging the paper or tearing the paper. I'm just very lightly scraping this craft knife against any areas that I want to brighten up and it's scraping back all of the darker top layers of pencil to that layer of cream that we did at the very beginning. So I want to be looking at any areas which do need a little bit of lightening up. So there's the odd area towards the top, and then there's this very prominent area that I've been talking about here. Again, just wants to be gently scraping this craft knife against the paper and just adding some of those lighter details back in. Now I am looking at the reference while I do this and they're not all, as I've mentioned before, perfectly going in the same direction. They are going in slightly different directions. Although I'm not perfectly trying to match the reference photo, I do want to try and get it quite similar because that's going to help it to look the most realistic. So I'm just going to work my way around the drawing once again, looking for any areas that I think need lightening up, which is generally mostly around that area I mentioned and a little bit around the left-hand side so a little bit around here. Then once I've added in all of these lighter details with the craft knife, I then want to think about adding in any final details. So looking around some of these lighter hairs, there's a lighter hairs that are surrounded by more of that reddy brown again. So I'm just going to go back in with this color, use it to in a way outline some of these lighter hairs to put a subtle line underneath them and it just helps them stand out a little bit more. So you can particularly see me doing that here, and it just helps this hair down here just pop a bit more. So I'm going to add any final details around this area. Then the last thing that's really standing out to me is the top left corner. I can see quite a lot of gray up here that I don't have at the moment, so I'm going to add that in. Then that is it. So that's my general method of how I go about drawing fur. So now we've practiced all of the steps to draw fur, let's take a look at drawing the sleepy mouse. 9. The Mouse - Studying the Reference Photo: Let's start thinking about drawing this mouse. But before we get started, it's always very important to have a good look at the reference photo. Let's have a look at it together, and I can show you what I'm thinking, and seeing when I look at this. Now the first thing I want to focus on while looking at this mouse is, looking at the underlying colors of the fur. If you ignore all of the fur texture, you'll notice that this mouse is made up of a number of different base colors. In some areas, it looks like a yellowy orange. I'm particularly, noticing around here. That same color extends down the mouse's back and around here. In some other areas, it looks more like a very light gray. For example, this little patch here and around here. Then the in-between areas, I would say a more like a darker gray. For example, around here. The first thing we're going to want to do is, build up those base colors before I think about any texture. Now there are some areas within the mouse's fur that do look particularly dark to me. I'm looking at this patch up here and this patch around here, and there's also quite a deep shadow along here. Now you can't really see much fur texture here. It's all a little bit out of focus. I do think I want to draw it a little bit out of focus, although, maybe, not so much to this extent. There are some areas that are out of focus, so like the mouse's nose, that actually, I want to draw in a bit more detail. I'm looking at the shapes that I can see here, and I'm going to draw them in a bit less blurry. I have a look at doing that as I start the drawing. Whilst I'm still thinking about these base underlying colors, I'm also seeing if I can see any colors within the fur that I wouldn't necessarily think would be there. Now, I would say that there's a little bit of pink within the fur. Maybe, a little bit around here, and also, maybe, a little bit around this area. I can also see a little hint of, maybe, a reddish purple around here. Those are some of the colors I want to build up whilst I'm building up the base layers. Another, obviously, very important part of drawing this mouse is looking at the fur. Actually on the most part, all the fur to me, looks pretty much the same length. There's no areas that are much longer than others. The only, maybe, part is around the edge of the hair, is much shorter fur hair. But for the most part, on the whole of the mouse's body, it all looks to be the same length. As far as the direction of the fair, again, on the most part, it's going in the directions that I would imagine. It's going in this direction here, is moving more on to this direction here. This fur here goes around, and then comes down. I have to draw that in when I get to adding fur texture. Around here, it comes down quite sharply. Now the last thing that I'm, particularly, noticing about the mouse is, obviously, he is stood on a leaf. I'm wanting this to be relatively quick and easy drawing. I think, I'm just going to draw a shadow under the mouse. I'm not going to worry about drawing the actual leaf. Now we know what we're looking at. In the next lesson, I want to create a sketch. 10. The Mouse - Create the Sketch: Let's create a sketch of our mouse. Now, before I show you the main method that I always use for my sketching, the first thing I want you to note is that it is so important to draw your sketching really, really lightly. The goal is for this to not show at the end. You want to do it so light that you can see it but barely. Then as we build up all of the colors with the color pencils, you won't be able to see at the end. Now, I will show you how I create the sketch. But if you just want to use my sketch, I have included one in the class resources. Whenever I'm creating a sketch, I like to use what's called grid method. This is where you draw a series of squares on your reference photo and you do exactly the same on your paper. You want to make sure that you have the same number of squares on both, then rather than trying to draw the whole mouse freehand, all I want to do is draw what's in each individual square. It stops me from looking at the mouse as a mouse and just looks at it as a series of objects within the squares, you end up with a much more accurate sketch. Once I've gone through every square one at a time, and I'm happy that I have my sketch down on the paper, I then want to erase all of the grid lines. I want to be left with just the sketch. That's a very brief summary of the grid method, is a nice and simple method. If you again want to see it more in depth, I do go into a lot more detail on my beginner's guide color pencil course. Now that we have our sketch outlines down on paper, in the next lesson, we want to start drawing. 11. The Mouse - Create the Light Base Layers: Just like we practiced, we want to start off this mouse by building up the base layers. I want to begin by looking for the very lightest color in the reference photo. Now, I would say that the lightest color is lighter, cool, gray. I'm particularly seeing this color around here behind the ear, as well as you can see it very prominently in this little strip here. I am going to use the lightest cool gray that I have in my set. Exactly the same way that I have showed you up until now, I want to be adding a very light layer of this color. Now, I am putting the color over the whole of the mouse. I'm using the circular motions, so I want to make this as light as possible and also as smooth as possible. That's going to give me something that I can then build other layers on top of. Just like I've showed you before, notice that I'm holding the pencil reasonably far back. I'm not holding it right near the tip. Again, that just helps me to make this as smooth as possible. Now, I'm literally just blocking in the whole of the mouse. I'm not worrying about adding in any shading where the shadow will be. For now, I really want to just focus on putting this color where the actual mouse is. By the time that I've built this color up over the whole of the mouse, it should look something like this. You'll see that I've made it as smooth as I can. It's not perfectly smooth, but that's okay. The most important thing is to make it as light as possible, even if it's a little bit patchy, little bit scratchy, that can be fixed if it's made very light. As I built up this first very light layer, I want to take a look at the reference photo again and I want to look for the next darkest color. Now, looking at the photo again, the next darkest color is probably this orangey brown that you can particularly see around here. I'd say, it's most prominent around here, around this section, around the back, and also around the mouse's face, although not so much on the eye. I'm going to move on to the burnt ocher pencil. I, once again, want to make this as smooth as possible. Remember that we're not worrying about adding in any fair texture at this point. We really just want to be building up some nice smooth base layers. I'm putting this anywhere where I can see even a hint of this color. If I can see this color or a dark color, I want to add a light layer of the burnt ocher. You will see once again, I'm working in these very small circular motions. You'll notice that I am once again holding the pencil pretty far back. I generally find holding it towards the middle of the pencil is the right area for me. If I hold it much further back than this, then I feel like I just can't really control where the pencil is going. If I hold it close to the tip, it becomes much harder to keep the layers light. It requires more pencil control. Holding the pencil towards the middle is the sweet spot I find. Simply work my way around the mouse. You'll notice here that I'm adding some of this color working around where the eye is going to be, as I mentioned, the eyelid itself. The eyelids of the mouse are much lighter. I don't want to be adding this color here, but I do want to work out from that section. I find it better to work gradually so I put a very light layer of the color to start with. Then if I want to make it a little bit darker, then I just go over it more times. I don't want to, at any point, go in really hard with the pencil. I'm also going to add some of this color on the mouse's ear, as well. I would say particularly around the edge of the ear here, you can see a lot of this orangey tone, as well as around this section. Then from there, I can keep working my way along the body of the mouse. I've added some of this coloring around the top of the mouse's head. In this area, as I said, you can see a little bit of orangey tone here. Then I want to start working along this line, this orangey section here and come around here. This area, I can't see anywhere near as much of this orange tone. I work my way around and underneath that lighter patch, so round the back of the mouse. You can see that this is reasonably quickly actually starting to look like a mouse and we've only done two colors so far. We do want to continue to build up these base layers. I once again, want to look at the reference photo and really think about what the next darkest color is. I'm actually looking at a lot of the same areas. Around here, for example is what is actually around the top here. I'm seeing a pink or, at least, on these areas are more pink tone than what I've got at the moment. I'm going to use this reasonably bright pink to just go over again, anywhere where I can see a little hint of this color. Now, you might think that, in fact, there's not going to be any bright pink like this, but my rule with drawing is always if I can see it in the reference photo, then I should draw it. I want to make sure that I'm using this color all the way down and onto the mouse's nose. There is a reasonable amount of pink around here, as well as a bit more on the mouse's ear. You'll also notice that there's a reasonable amount of pink on the paws of the mouse. I'm particularly looking around here, it's really quite bright hair, as well as around here. This is a pinky gray. Then again, you can see some bright pink here too. Then I can work my way around the back of the mouth, just brightening up and making these orangey brown sections a little bit more pink. As I mentioned, I would say that they do look a bit more of a pinky tone to them. Now beyond that, you'll notice that once again, I'm holding the pencil far back and working in these circular motions and pressing very lightly. The other thing that you want to be particularly conscious about whilst you're building up these light layers is to have a nice and sharp pencil. It's just going to make your life so much easier. You're going to end up with a more consistent color. If you don't sharpen your pencil frequently, it tends to just look a bit more patchy, I find, and it's just 10 times harder to control. Once I'm happy with the pinks, I want to once again look at the reference photo. We're now looking for the next darkest color and we're getting more towards some of the mid-tones. I would say at this point, a lot of those lightest colors have been built up. Now, the main color that's missing or the main colors that are missing from here, I would say are generally browns. Looking at particularly this area, for example, this is a reasonably light brown, so I want to be picking the lightest brown that I have in my set. This for me is the best pencil. If I wasn't using this then I would probably use something like raw umber. I'm once again going back over a lot of these areas, really adding this in anywhere where I can see some of this lighter, more mid-tone brown. As I mentioned, in front of the eye, around the front of the mouse's face here, there's a lot of it in this section. I'm also actually going to use it to mark in the eye. At the moment, I've only got the outline from where I made my sketch. I I it's going to make my life easier if I get that malt in slightly clearer, although, I would say that I think it's a bit darker on the reference photo, but I can just mark it in with this lighter color and I can always go over it later. I then want to continue shading out from this point. I'm noticing that just behind the eye here, it's a little bit darker. This patch here is quite a bit darker than a lot of the rest of the mouse's face. I'm also going to want to shade in this darker patch here, as well as this dark patch here. There's some spots here from where the whiskers of the mouse are coming out from. As you can see around this section, there's a very dark, curved patch, which is the mouse's nose. That's essentially what I'm looking for here. I want to look for these darker patches and using these circular motions mark them in. I wouldn't say it needs to be perfect at this point. I want to try and get it as close to the reference photo as I can, try and get these darker patches marked in as closely as they can, but it doesn't need to be absolutely perfect. We can always tweak it and adjust it a bit later. We have got a lot more pencil that's going to go over the top of this. Let's work out from the face and keep building up some of this color. From here, I can start thinking about adding a bit more shading onto the ears, particularly around the edge of the ear, particularly this patch here. I'm not going to worry so much about this inner ear section, mostly because it's much darker brown. I think I'm going to mark that in with a darker brown in the next section. But you can see I can add some light shading with this brown around the edge of the ear here. Then I can again, focus on building up some more shading on the top of the mouse's head that needs to be made quite a bit darker. That's a darker brown, I would say. Then I'm once again, going to go over this same area that I've mentioned a lot. I can think it would benefit from being made fair bit darker and I want to go all the way round the back of the mouse as well here. Now, I'll just add a little bit of shading on to the mouse's front paw, and maybe tweak a couple of bits around the eye. Then from here, I would say that I'm happy with these first few base layers. These are the lightest and more mid-tone base layers. In the next section, we can start thinking about adding in some of the darker base layers. But by the end of this first section, you should have a little mouse that looks something like this. 12. The Mouse - Create the Darker Base Layers: Now by this point we have a template to work off of. Because in the previous section we've already built up a reasonable number of layers, we very much got the general shape and shading of the mouse. What we need to do here is continue to work on these base layers and really focus now on some of the darker colors. Comparing what I've got here to the reference photo, what we particularly want to do now is add in some of these darker browns. I'm happy with the lighter browns, but there are a lot of sections where it needs to be much darker. I'm going to use the darkest brown that I have in my set, and I'm really just focusing on adding this into these darkest patches. Now, first off, I want to stress that I'm still doing this in exactly the same way. I still want to be pressing very lightly, I still want to be working in circular motions, and I'm still not worrying about adding in any texture. I'm holding the pencil a little bit closer to the tip, though. Although I want to be adding this in lightly, I also by now need to be reasonably precise on where I'm putting the color. Say for example, on this section I'm working on here around where there's these dark markings on the mouse's face where the whiskers are coming from, there are series of dots, and I want to mark those dots in it a bit clearer with this dark pencil. I also want to be pretty accurate with where I'm putting this curved shape that I've mentioned before for the mouse's nose. Again, I need to be holding the pencil a bit closer to the tip for this, although not right to the tip. Then I'm just looking at each section one part at a time. Focusing on adding some of the darker areas around the mouse's nose, around the mouse's mouth. Then I can also start marking ends that are around the pore here. This has a pretty dark brown all the way around here, as well as around here, and underneath here. Once we get all of that marked in, again, really looking at the reference photo, as I'm drawing, I'm constantly comparing the reference photo to my drawing. I also want to go back over this eye here. As I mentioned before, I did very roughly mark in with that lighter brown just to put something here, but I do want to be adding a bit of a darker area. It looks quite a lot darker than the previous brown on the reference photo. I also want to add a little bit of shading towards the inner corner of the eye. Again, this area looks quite a bit darker. You can see that here, there's this very dark patch here. Then generally this section, I would say, is darker than what I have at the moment, as well as a dark patch here, and this area also needs some more of this darker brown shading. Then once I've added that and I can work out from here, maybe adding a little bit of light shading on the front of the mouse's face just to make this area a little bit darker. Then I can use this pencil to mark in some of the shapes for the ear. This section here is pretty dark. Cant mark anything in for this area up until now. I also wanted to add a bit more shading around the edge of the ear. I can start working either a lot of these same patches that I've talked about a lot up until now, going back over them very lightly with these circular motions, once again, just making what's here a little bit darker. Now, this patch here needs to be a fair amount darker. You'll notice that rather than going over the area harder, I'm going over it more times to gradually build up that color until it is as dark as I want it to be from the reference photo. Just keep building it up using those circular motions to make this, again still as smooth as possible, but just repeatedly going over it and is gradually becoming a darker brown. The temptation is to press harder to make it darker, but you want to avoid doing that. I can always say work around the back of the mouse and add a reasonable amount on the top of the mouse here. Again, I want it to be a pretty dark patch. Now before I move on from using this color, I'm going to add a little bit of shading onto the shadow underneath the mouse. At the moment, I've really just been focusing on the mouse itself, but I do want to have a light shadow under here. I'm just going to add something in here now, just very lightly, and I can always add to it and build upon it a bit later. Let's go a little bit more around some of the mouse's pores and focus on adding something for the shadow on this left-hand side as well. Now from here, I would say that I'm pretty happy with some of the darkest areas where I've added in. From here, I want to once again be thinking about if there's any other colors I want to add for the base layer. I wouldn't say that at this point I'm so much focusing on thinking about the next darkest color because this is probably the darkest color I'll be using for now. I just generally want to think about if there's any colors in the base layer that is missing. Comparing my drawing to the reference photo, the thing that is glaringly obvious to me that I would like to add more of is some more gray. When we first started doing the base layers, we use a very light cold gray just to add those absolute lightest values. Now that I've added in a lot of the browns and a lot of the other colors, I think it's missing a darker, cool gray as well. I want to be going over particularly generally, I would say the areas that are very light at the moment. This area here, for example, is a very light patch on the mouse, but it looks a bit too light, so I can just tone it down, I guess a bit with this darker gray. Still going about it in exactly the same way and it's just making it look a little bit less patchy. Now I would say that I'm mostly focusing on putting this color in those lightest areas. But the most important thing to do is to look at the reference photo and see where the gray is. So for example you can see a lot of gray around underneath this mouse's chin and the end of its nose, as well as a lot of gray generally all around here. As I've mentioned before, I can see a little gray on the mouse's pore. These are the areas that I'm focusing on building up this color. I think it's where I'm adding this in, that is making a lot more sense. As far as the base layer goes, it looks, as I say, too patchy up until now. We do want it to look natural. It's not going to have all of the texture of the mouse at this point, but we do want it to basically look like roughly what we want the end product to look like. I'm building up a lot of this color, as I say, around this lighter back section here where I could see quite a lot of gray. I want to focus on adding a reasonable amount on this back foot around here as well. By the time that you built up all of these base layers, you should have a little mouse that looks something like this. It pretty much looks like a mouse, but as I said, it has no texture. That's fine. This is what we want it to look like at this point. In the next section, we can start thinking about building up some of that texture. 13. The Mouse - Building up the Fur Texture: Now at this point, now that we've built up all of our base layers, we can now start thinking about adding in some of that fur texture. Now what I want to do here is work through a lot of the same colors that we've used up until now. I'm going to start off with that lighter brown. I'm not going to worry for now about adding in some of the very light colors. I want to think about adding in fur texture with the mid-tones. Beginning here by adding some flicks with the pencil around the edge of the mouse's face, just like we practiced earlier in the course, I'm lightly flicking my pencil against the paper, just gently brushing it against the paper to make this very soft texture. Now the main thing that I'm particularly focusing on here is the direction of the fur. Let's look at the reference photo together and really focus on the direction of the fur as well as the length of the fur. If it's shorter fur, we need to be making sure to flicks and if it's longer fur we need to be making longer flicks. In this section here that I've started off drawing, this is very short fur it's much shorter here than it is over here. Around the edge of the mouse is a little bit blurry because the photo is a little bit of focus in this area. But you can see fur around the edge here. You can see that it's flicking up in this direction. Then as we get around the top, it starts getting a little bit more straight up I would say. As far as the direction of the fur goes. This fur, it's going in an upward direction. By the time that it gets to here, it's going in this direction. Underneath the eye, I would say it's going in this direction, and here it's also going in the same direction, but underneath the ear, it starting to turn around and down towards the bottom, so around and down here in this direction here, going more in this direction here. Then it curves around this section of the mouse's leg, so the fibrous curving around here and then down. As I said it is very important that we make flicks with the pencil, really looking at the directions of that fur. Now it looks a little bit light at this point. It doesn't look like there's a huge amount of fur. That's okay. We're going to build up a lot of layers of these flicking motions with a lot of different colors. We don't need it to look like really thick interesting fur after this first pencil. You'll see that I am following this direction of the fur. I tend to like starting building up the fur with the lighter colors and then working my way towards the darker colors. If I can begin building out the direction and length of the fur with this lighter color, it makes my life a lot easier, a lot clearer as I get towards the darker colors. If I make a mistake with anything with these lighter colors, it's very easily captured by the dark colors. If I went straight in, adding flicking motions with a darker pencil and mapping out where all of the fur directions need to be. If I make a mistake, if some of the fur is going slightly in the wrong direction, it's going to be very hard to cover that up. For fur length, I would say that the fur is shortest around the mouse's face. It gets a little bit longer around here and around this section and then it looks at its longest around here. It's not extremely long, but I do want to be making longer flicks in this area than I am in this area on the mouse's feet. This is probably the shortest fur you can see some fur here is very light and very short soft fur. I want to be bearing all of that in mind as I'm filling in this fur texture. I make sure as I go around the edge of the mouse, I am adding these light flicks at the moment because I've just done base layers. It's a very abrupt edge to the mouse, but that's obviously not how animals actually look. I want to make sure that I got fur texture going right up to the edge so that it generally, the mask looks a little bit more fluffy. I spent quite a long time building out the fur texture on this first pencil, but now everything is very clearly mapped out. I really think I know what fur needs to be going where. From here, I want to move on to the next darkest color. This is the gray, the darker gray that I use towards the end of the previous chapter. Then once again, I want to be using these flicking motions building up anywhere where I can see some gray in the fur. Generally, where I put the gray base layers, I want to be adding flicking motions to build up some fur texture in those same areas. Now the main thing that I want to stress to you about adding these flicking motions is to frequently sharpen your pencil. Your pencil will get blunt a lot faster than you would expect it to, and you'll end up with much softer, more delicate looking first strokes if you've frequently sharpen it. I build up these flicks with the pencil on this light patch on the top of the mouse's head. Because I haven't really got any texture there at the moment because I didn't need to add any of the brown to this area. I can also go around the edge of the mouse. Again, just adding to what I've already done with the brown pencil. As you get to the top, you'll notice that I'm using slightly longer flicks to build up that longer fur texture. Then I can carry those longer flicks rounds again following the direction of that fur. This is made, as I say, a lot easier because I've already marked in a lot of the directions with the previous pencil. I want to go over the whole of the mouse's back and really focus on adding a reasonable amount of this gray around the edge of the mouse. Again, just so that it's less abrupt edge, so that it looks generally a little bit fluffier. From here, once I'm happy with this color, I can move onto my next darkest color. I'm going to add in this much darker brown now, I'm not exclusively using flicking motions there. I want to make the nose of the mouse a bit darker and make these spots a little bit darker. I'm going to start off by doing that again with circular motions and then once I'm happy with that, I can add some very small little flicks on some of the darker sections. These are a lot the same as what I've previously done. I'm looking at the same dark sections, the same dark patches, just still building them up, which I can do nice and gradually so that I have more control over what's going, where really making this patch at the front of the mouse's face quite a lot darker with some very small flicks since it's very short fur. I also want to add some of this darker pencil around the edge. I'm noticing that around the edge here, it has got some pretty dark strands of fur. It's not all very light fur around the edge here. I generally like starting on the face and working my way out from here. You can see that quite quickly this texture is being built up. The mouse is starting to look fluffy pretty fast. I want to focus also on adding a bit more shading and a little bit more texture around the bottom of the mouse's face. As I mentioned previously, this area under here needs to be pretty dark. I did add some shading with the base layers, but I want to blend this a bit better into the rest of the mouth. Again, I can use flicking motions so that it looks a bit more like fur around here. Let's go over the mouse's back, adding flicking motions along here as well, just making the area a little bit darker before I can then start building up quite a lot of this darker color around the back of the mouse. Now you'll notice that I am really taking my time over this. I'm not rushing. Although on the whole, I would say that this mouse didn't take huge amount of time. I really don't want to rush it. I want to take my time building up this texture gradually. It's going to look a lot softer, a lot more realistic if I let the colors gradually build. Once I worked my way over, a lot of the mouse with this darker color, I'm noticing that around the feet. Again, it's not looking dark enough at the moment, although I did build up quite a lot of this brown around this area in the base layers. I'm going to switch back to circular motions and add some more shading around this area. I do want this to blend into the area where I built the texture, the flicking motion area. I'm just lightly building this up using circular motions like I did before. He also wants to make the mouse's ear a little bit darker. Everything has been built up with much lighter shading up until now. But now that I've built up a reasonable amount, it's clear to see what needs to go where, I can really start going back over these areas more time to really building up some of these darker values. Going over some of these dark patches like this area here. I also want to make this area towards the back a little bit darker. I'm going to do a lot more of this later on in the drawing. But for now, it just makes it a bit easier for me to see what other colors are missing. If I get these darker brown patches a bit closer to what they look like in the reference photo. This go around the bottom of the foot as well. I do want to give this a clearer line. I am noticing that between, I'm going to call them toes, between the mouse's toes, this is really very dark. It's very dark hair. There's this very dark line along the bottom and it's also very dark around here. I want to be adding that in and just going over these areas with those circular motions to help me get my bearings a bit more to help me see which colors are missing. Then I can continue to build up the flicking hair motions. I will just shade back over the whole shadow underneath, just lightly just to again, make this a little bit more obvious. I think it was a bit too light and as I say, make it easier to see what needs adding where if I go over this now, up until now, the walnut brown has been the darkest color that I've used on the mouse, but I actually don't think that it's a dark enough color, particularly because I think with the flicking motions, the brown looks lighter than it otherwise would. I'm going to use the dark sepia. This is the darkest color in my set that isn't black. If you don't have a very dark gray like this, you could use the black, just try and use it quite lightly. I think it looks a bit too harsh if you go in really hard with the black and I once again, I want to go over these darkest areas. It's a lot of the same areas that I've pointed out around the mouse's eye around this area at the front. I want to very lightly again add those flicking motions and just really add to what's here. Now I am also going to use this pencil over this light section because this area, the underlying colors are quite light, but there is a lot of darker flicks of fur in this area. It's exactly the same up here, although this area, for example, is pretty light, you can see some really quite dark fur strands going through this area. That's what I can use this dark sepia pencil for to build up some of those darker strands of fur that's going through these lighter areas of fur. Once again I want to add some of this color around the edge. Around the edge does have quite a lot of dark fur strands. I'm just going to work over the mouse in exactly the same way. Once again, using mid-length flicking motions over the top of the background here where I would say that the fur is midland. It also wants to build up a lot of these flicking motions on this top section where there is that darker patch. Then I can also come around here to this area where again, we say the fur is probably the longest on the mouse. I'm noticing that here, there's some really dark flicks of fur, particularly in a strip along here. I'm going to want, say, gradually build that up, just going over a number of times with flicks of the pencil. Then from here, I can go over some of the areas where I used the walnut brown just to help make the brown appear a little bit darker. It might be that once I've done that, I'm thinking that it's still not looking dark enough in comparison to the reference photo. I can go back over the areas. Again, particularly this patch up here that needs to be pretty dark. Go back over it again with these flicking motions. It's just to really make it look a lot deeper. By the end of this section, what you should have is a fluffy little mouse that looks a little bit scratchy, is not looking like a soft, fluffy mouse to me right now, but I would say that it does have the texture of the mouse and it also has the general colors that we need, what we want to do in the next section. It's just really soften the fur a lot. We want to make it look a lot fluffier. 14. The Mouse - Smoothing out the Fur: Now I have all of the fur texture built up on the mouse. I want to start thinking about smoothing everything out, making the fur look a little bit less scratchy. I want to once again go over the mouse, but using circular motions again, which is just going to help smooth out, make the whole thing look a lot fluffier. I'm starting working through a lot of the same colors that I've used up until now. Starting off here with the orangey brown and very similar to what I did when I was working through the base layers. I want to once again put this anywhere where I can see this color. Starting off around the eye again, now I would say here that I'm using a medium to light pressure. I'm not going as lightly as I did when I was adding in those base layers. That's because now I've got a reasonable amount of pencil built up on the paper. If I go as lightly as I did before, it's just not really going to do anything. That said, I don't want to press extremely hard. That's just going to end up completely going over all of the fur texture. I want to make sure that I can still see it, although I want it to be smoother so I would say that it is a light to medium pressure. If you're unsure if you're doing the right pressure, definitely go to light rather than too heavy. You can always press harder, but once you've pressed harder, you've committed to doing that. I also wanted to go over the air a little bit here. As I mentioned before, down the side of the ear has a little bit of this orange, and then I can start working my way along the mouse's back. Now once again, you'll notice that I'm not holding the pencil really close to the tip, although I am using more pressure than I was at the beginning, I still want to stop myself from pressing too hard. The most important thing here you'll notice is doing these circular motions. Now, I am going to use a number of different colors here. I'm just focusing on adding this in any of them more orange spots. I don't want to press so hard that I won't be able to put other pencil over the top of what I've got here. As I've gone around the back of the mouse around that back leg, avoiding that lightest strip in the middle, you can see it's already looking a lot better. These areas that I've gone over are looking much, much smoother, much more fluffy, much more natural. He also wants to be adding in a little bit of this color around the bottom of the mouth, as well as a tiny bit on the nose around here. I'll also go over this patch on the top of their head. Still in the same way, still using this medium to light pressure and still most importantly, working in circular motions. Also still don't forget to keep a nice sharp pencil. It's going to make the whole thing much easier and it's going to look much better because you'll have more control. Now I want to carry on working through those same colors that I did when I was doing the very first base layers. Once again, I want to move on to this reasonably bright pink now. I want to brighten up a lot of these pink patches, which generally speaking, just like I said before, is around the top of the mouse. Here I also want to go over some of the orange patches where I want to make it just a little bit more of a pinky orange. I can once again go over that. I'm using the same amount of pressure that I was for the more orangey color. You can see that I would say it's reasonably subtle what we're doing here, but not so subtle that you can't see it. Add a little bit of this pink along this strip here. It helps blend the more orangey fur into this section, which is more of a gray fur. Then once I'm happy with the right half of the mouse want to add a bit of this pink around the mouse's face, particularly around near the eye, so around the edge around here, as well as I wanted to add a reasonable amount of this color on the mouse's nose. Once again, I would say that I can see this in the reference photo. It also, I think it looks very sweet, so I want to make sure that I add that in. From here, I can begin focusing on the mouse's pause which as I've said before, have a very pinky look to them. Right now they look a bit too light, a little bit too gray. I want to give them a little bit more color, particularly towards the toes and this section up the top. Then from here I want to really think about which color I think is missing. Although on the most part, I'm working through a lot of the colors that I use when I was doing the base layer, it doesn't mean that if I noticed that a color is particularly missing, I'm not going to add that in. For example here around this dark patch at the top, although I would say that it has more of a pinky toe around here. Now that I've added in that pink, I think it's missing more ready purple tone as well. I can take this red violet and I only want to add a little bit, and I'm actually here adding this with very light flicking motions rather than circular motions. This is because I really only want to add a very small amount of this coloring. Because I didn't build up any of the fur texture in the last section with this color, I'm able to add this in now. It may be that once I've added this in, I decide that I want to add a bit more shading, I want to add a little bit more of this color and I can always add circular motions over the top of it but to start with, I do want to begin with that flicking motion. I'm also going to add some of this color over the mouse is pause just to brighten that up a little bit more. It's really in a lot of the same areas that I put the pink previous thing. I can think about any other areas where I can see some of this colors in particularly looking at the air now, particularly this area down here has a very slight pinky purple tone to it. I can just lightly add that in and then I can think about again, which color I think is missing, which color I need to add. I'm going to go back to this darker, cool gray. I'm just very lightly go over some of these light patches, as I've mentioned before, I think some of them look a bit too light and would benefit from a bit more of a gray just to tone them down, I'm using a mixture of pencil strokes here. I'm very lightly doing my circular motions once again, but I'm also sometimes just going back and forth with the pencil to add a very light hint of texture. Let's not forget about adding this around the eyes as well. So you can use this pencil to create a bit less of a abrupt edge to the eyelid or to the line of the eye. I'm also going to add some very small flux around here, just to give it a bit more texture on this part, I actually don't think I put a huge amount of texture on here and although I can't see a great deal in the reference photo, there is some very subtle little hairs. I can do the same around the ear here. I just want to add a very small hint of texture. The most part what I'm doing here is smoothing everything out. But I do also if I can see texture that I haven't got, I do want to make sure that I add that in. Whereas on this part of the ear I do want this to be very smooth. So I don't want to be adding more texture in this area. Let's keep smoothing out some of the mouse's first. This patch along the top, I can once again go back to these circular motions and just use this to make everything look a lot softer. Let's do the same along the mouse's back where again, it's looking a little bit too light. I can add some of the gray over the top of the orange and the pink and purple if I want to slightly adjust the color, then I'm going to keep working my way around here, toning down some of these brighter areas. Along the back leg of the mouse, along here, I can work in circular motions around here and I can go all the way down into these sections as well. Then once I'm happy with most of the mouse's body, I also don't want to forget to add a bit more shading onto the mouse's feet and legs. Right now, they are very bright pink. I want to tone that down a little bit and generally make the light section a bit less light. As I say, it's all looking too bright, too much at the moment. You see that quite quickly this is really turning into a nice little fluffy mouse. I want to at this point also go back over this shadow a bit more. Again with circular motions, I do want to make this as smooth as possible and I'm really just going over the patch that I previously have. Then I want to just keep working my way through and towards some of the darker colors. This point I would say that most of the lighter colors are looking a lot softer, a lot smoother, but I've lost a lot of the contrast. I can go back to the dark sepia and add some of this contrast back in. I'm once again going about this in circular motions. I would say that I'm pressing a little bit lighter with this pencil because I just don't want to risk it going on too dark and as I said, you can always go over an area and more times to make it look darker, I'm getting a bet. A lot of these same darkest patches so these spots on their Mouse's face where the whiskers are going to be coming from, as well as around the bottom of the mouse's face along here. The very beginning, I added in a lot of walnut brown to this area, and it's all got a little bit lost. It's looking to light. Now this is all part of adding in the contrast, which to me is the most important part of drawing with colored pencils, regardless of the kind of texture that you're doing, I want to try and get the contrast matching as closest to the reference as I can. That's what I'm particularly focusing on here going around the edge of the hair, really making some of these areas that need to be looking darker, adding to them a fair bit, both around the edge and on this darker patch towards the middle. Again, making sure that I go over this area down the bottom, as I say, that is looking too light the moment is a lot darker on the reference. Going back over that and exactly the same way as I did before, and also all along the top of the feet. It'd be looking at the reference photo, the absolute darkest areas to me along the eye, this patch and this patch, these spots along here in this section, all along the bottom of the mouth and all along the top of the feet and the bottom of the feet actually as well. This patch here and this patch here and then there's some very dark areas. So some very dark flicks of fair along here and there is this dark patch here. We're essentially going through and adding to those areas. Those are the areas that I'm particularly focusing on. I can go along the shadow at the bottom, really defining and shaping the mouse's toes here, really adding these dark patches of shading between the toes, I can once again use the smooth circular motions to make the shadow all along the bottom so on the right-hand side as well, a lot darker, just really adding to that contrast. Once I've gone over all of these very dark areas with the circular motions, so as I say, along the bottom of the foot in this darker patch here as well, and in this area towards the top, adding circular motions here as well. From here we want to think about maybe adding some flicking motions where that fur was a lot darker. In this area here with a very sharp pencil, I'm just adding some more prominent flux. I'm still pressing, reasonably lightly I would say medium to light pressure, adding some more flex just because they are such a prominent flicks and patches of fur along here. Then I can also add some more texture, some more flexors, a few other places, particularly along the mouse's back and along the top of the mouse's head. I don't want to forget to add some more texture on the top of the mouse's head hair as well. Now I would say at this point the mouse is looking pretty good. It's the queen I since meet now nice and smooth now a lot smoother than it looked at the beginning of this section. I'll just go back to a few of these other colors that you used at the beginning of this section. Back to this orangey brown, I just want to turn down this area back to the lighter gray, the lighter cold gray that I use at the very beginning of the drawing and just blend and brighten up a few of these very light patches. You can see that that is helping to make these light areas look a lot softer. They were probably the areas that we're looking the most scratchy at this point. I can just go over the top in these large circular motions to help smooth that out. It also wants to do exactly the same with the mouse's feet. Now at this point, I would say that you could leave the drawing here. It looks like a little mouse is looking nice and soft. In the next section though, we can think about adding in some of the final details, but I would very much say that that is an optional step. 15. The Mouse - Add the Final Touches: In this final step of drawing the mouse, I want to think about adding in some finishing touches. There's a few things I can do to just improve upon this mouse a little bit more. The first thing I want to do as I covered when we were drawing the ginger swatch, is use the craft knife. Where I've used all of these circular motions to smooth out the fur and where this mouse has a lot of light strands of fur in and among some darker fur, some of those lighter strands have been lost. So I can use this craft knife to put the light fur back in. Now we would say that this is reasonably subtle, but do you think it makes a difference to the finished piece? That said, if you don't have a craft knife, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just like we did before, I'm very lightly scraping my craft knife in flicking motions once again against the fur of the mouse. Now I think a few of the important things here is, first off, to make sure that you're doing this very lightly. It's so important. You don't want to be pressing really hard. You don't want to risk damaging the paper and if you haven't already, I very strongly recommend practicing and testing this before you start doing this on your finished drawing. It'll be such a shame to get this far and damage what you've done. The other thing is you don't want to overdo it. It's very much a case to me that less is more and I'm focusing on the areas that I think have the most prominent lighter fur. So you'll notice that I'm particularly focusing on the top of the mouse's head along here, just adding the same length flicks as I added when I was drawing in all of that fur texture to start with and add a little bit around here as well, and a little bit on the mouse's back. As I said, I don't want to overdo it. I don't want to add too much, but just going over these key areas, I do think it's adding an extra level of detail. Once I've gone over all of the fur that I want to with the craft knife, I'm also just going to use this to scrape away where the whiskers are going to go. So while we're looking at the reference photo, the whiskers are pretty light. This is almost white as is this and a lot of the other whiskers are also very light. I can use the craft knife to add those and scrape away some of those layers of pencil so that I'm able to add those whiskeys in with a light color of pencil. I am trying to get these in roughly the same place as on the reference photo although, as I always think, it doesn't need to be absolutely perfect. It doesn't need to be in exactly the same place. Now that I've used the craft knife to marking where that whisker is going to go, I'm also going to add in the rest of the whiskers with this very light gray. So just using flicking motions. Again, looking at the reference, trying to work out where I think they should go, not just the very light ones that we marked them with craft knife, I'm going to add in all of them with this gray. Now the most important thing here is that you have a very sharp pencil. I did take my pencil away and sharpened it before I started doing this and that just creates much cleaner, more crisp lines. Let's also go over all of the areas where I used the craft knife on the mouse's body and just smooth that out a little bit. I find that it looks a bit peculiar if you don't go over it with a pencil, but just very lightly. Actually the light whiskers, I don't know, I think it's not popping enough. So I'm just going to go around the edges of this one with the dark sepia and just lightly go over all of the whiskers, particularly where the whiskers are close to the mouse's face. I think that that is making these look more natural. The difficulty is because we're drawing this on a white background but the reference photo has a much darker background. It's just not showing up how I want them to. Then from here I'll use the dark sepia to add some final touches. So to go back over add in any more dark hairs that I think would benefit. Once again, using these flicking motions with a very sharp pencil, and I'm just going to once again darken down this patch on the top of the mouse and just slightly adjust this area around the back. These are really just final little tweaks. I've taken a minute to take a step back from my drawing, compare it to the reference and just think about any other little tweaks that I think would benefit. All right, and that is our little mouse. 16. Class Summary: That is the end of this class. I hope you've enjoyed it and you found it helpful. Hopefully, it makes everything a bit clearer on how to build up the fur texture. Now I would say that the most important parts of building up the fur is to firstly, make sure you have the right materials, particularly making sure that you have the right paper and make sure that you work lightly. It's better to work too lightly than too heavily in my opinion so what you want to do is select a reference photo and make sure that you have a really good look at it. From there you can draw out your sketch, particularly focusing on getting the proportions right, and then you can start thinking about building up the base layers so all of those underlying colors. For this section, again, you want to make sure that you get this really nice and smooth. It's only once those base layers are built up that you can then think about adding in the texture so from there you can start using the flicking technique with the pencil, working from the lighter colors towards the darker colors and while doing this, you really want to think about the direction of the fur as well as the length of the fur. Finally, you can think about going over the top of that texture with more of the soft circular motions to just really smooth everything out and also add in those final details. I hope that this class helps you realize how simple fur texture can be. Please do review this class. I would love to know what you think, and I'd also love to see any pictures that you've drawn. I look forward to seeing you in the next class.