How to Draw Fur in Procreate with Custom and Built-In Brushes

1. Introduction: Drawing or painting fur can seem really daunting. I'm sure most people would cringe at the idea of drawing thousands of strands of hair. In this class, I'm going to teach you how using specialized brushes can speed up that process immensely. By the end of this class, you'll be having fun drawing fur with ease. I'm Lisa Bardot, an illustration artist teacher and all around creative person. I help people find their creativity through drawing on the iPad. You might know me from my YouTube channel where I teach people all about drawing, illustration, and all things Procreate. In this class, you'll create three furry animal illustrations: a hairy sloth, a fluffy llama, and a super soft duckling. Each of these animals has a unique fur texture that you'll learn how to render. By the end, you'll be ready to create your own furry animal illustrations. For this class, we're going to be working on the iPad using the drawing and painting app Procreate. I love using Procreate because it allows me to dive deep and experiment with different artistic and visual styles without ever making a mess, and I can take it with me wherever I go. I've been using Procreate for about seven years, and I love sharing my knowledge with others. I will provide the animal sketches to you as Procreate files, so that you can focus on learning how to draw fur without worrying about how to draw the animals. I'll also let you know how you can get the free custom Procreate brushes that we're going to use in this class. Student should have a basic understanding of the Procreate interface, but I will be explaining each step as I go so that you can follow along. I designed this class for beginning artists and people who are learning to draw, but also for experienced illustrators who have ever agonize over drawing anything furry. Come along with me as we learn all about drawing fur in Procreate, that's not only fast but very fun. In just a few minutes, you'll be able to draw a furry illustration that looks like it took you forever. If you've ever avoided drawing bears, bunnies, foxes or ferrets, stick around as we open up the doors to a lot of furry possibilities. 2. Class Project: Your project for this class is to follow along and create the three animal illustrations. When you're done, I would love for you to take what you've learned and create your own furry illustration. It can be whatever you want, an animal, a monster, anything goes. Be sure to share your artwork down in the project section. 3. Fur Fundamentals: Let's get started. I'll begin by teaching you the basics and fundamentals of drawing fur, what makes something look fluffy or not. The first thing we're going to do, and this is a good idea when you're learning to draw anything, is look at some reference photos of fur. What we're doing here is making some observations, we' re trying to get an understanding of the qualities that make fur look like fur. One of the things you'll notice is you can see a lot of individual hairs and there's also a lot of texture. Whenever your brain translate something as having a lot of texture, what it's actually seeing is a lot of variances in highlights and shadows. It's seeing it change from dark to light, dark to light, dark to light a lot. That's why you can see the individual hairs is because the light is hitting those individual hairs and you also see the shadow of the hair. That translates as lots of texture. That's something we want to try and capture when we're drawing fur. Another thing you should notice, is that the hair or fur is a lot darker the closer it is to the skin. This is really just because those hairs are buried underneath other hairs. Closer to the skin, they're going to look a lot darker. That's a really important observation. Another thing to observe is the edges of the shape of the object or animals. Looking at this adorable dog, we can look at the edges of the body and it's very textured, there's a lot of texture going around the edge. Whereas if we looked at something that was not furry, that was smooth, or even that had shorter hair, we would see a lot smoother of an edge. The more furry you want something to look, the more fluffy you want it to look, you should put more texture around the edges. Then one more thing to observe is the actual texture of the fur. If you look at two different types of fur like this cow which has a lot of straight long hairs, and then this, maybe it's a poodle coat, I don't know. But the hairs are a lot shorter than the cow and they also have a lot of waviness to it. Something that you want to decide is what type of texture of hair your creature, animal or whatever it is going to have. You're going to use wavy lines, or you're going to use straight lines depending on what type of hair they have. With all those observations being made, I'm going to go ahead and quickly walk you through the process of creating a furry looking object. This isn't going to look like anything in particular and you don't need to follow along right now. This is just going to give you an idea of the process we're going to be going through as we work on our furry animals. We'll start out with a basic shape in a flat color. The first step is to add your edge texture and also start to establish the direction of the hair. I'm going around and adding strokes all around the edge of this shape. I am imagining that the hair is emanating from the top of this ball and hanging down. It's going downwards. If you're going to be adding any different colors as a part of the fur pattern, like we'll add some spots right here, we need to make sure to add edge texture to those as well. Here I'm smudging the color from the brown down into the orange, and then I'm also smudging the orange down into the brown. Now that we've got our edge texture all set up, I'm going to start adding the overall texture by adding in some darker hair marks. Now we've got the direction of the hair established. We want to do the same on the inside of the shapes. I'm going in with dark color, and I'm adding where all the directions is going to be of all the hair and giving it an overall texture. At this point I'm deciding which way I want the different chunks of hair to go, what direction. I'm also making sure to utilize the edge texture, and making sure those hairs follow that same direction I've already set up. Next I'm going to add some additional shading to give the shapes some volume. I'm imagining that the light is coming from the upper right, so I'm going to add some shadows to the lower left. I'm just darkening in overall. I'll also add a little shadows in the part of the hair. Now that we've got our dark parts all laid out, we're going to add some highlights. I'm coming in with a lighter color, and I'm adding in some highlights where the light is catching each of those strands of hair. Again, I'm paying attention to the direction of all the little chunks of hair that I've already established. The last step is to add some brighter spots of fur where the highlights on the shape would be. That's the basic process of making something look furry. Next, we're going to start working on the animal illustrations and you're going to follow along and learn exactly how to do this. 4. Installing Custom Brushes: Before we get started, I want to let you know how you can download and install the free brushes that we're going to be using for this tutorial. You can find the brushes that we'll be using for this tutorial on my website at bardotbrush.com/free. This is a set of 17 brushes that are designed to create five unique fur textures. Plus, there's also a brush for making shapes and for making shadows. Once you download the brush set file, it will appear in your downloads folder on your iPad. Tap the fur and Fluff brush set file, and it will be automatically imported into Procreate. You'll find this imported set at the top of the list in your brushes panel. The other thing you'll want to do, is download the three Procreate files that contain the animal sketches. You can find these files on the Skillshare page under the Projects and Resources tab. Once you download those, go to your downloads folder, tap each one and it will be imported into Procreate. Once you've got all that, we can get started. 5. The Hairy Sloth: Part 1 - Body: Now we're going to do our first animal illustration. We're going to be starting with the sloth. The sloth has long hair with a lot of really fun texture. Let's go ahead and get started with that. I have three files that are included in this download, the sloth, the llama, and the duckling. We are going to get started by painting the sloth. If you go into the Layers panel, you'll see that we have a sketch layer. As you can see, I've set the blend mode of this layer to multiply and I've also reduced the opacity. Here's where we're going to start drawing. If we go to our color picker, we're going to start with a medium gray with a little bit of warmness to it, and then we'll go over to our brushes, and we're going to open the Fur and Fluff set. In here are fur brushes in several different fur textures. Each one comes in a regular, a dark, and a light. Then there's also the shadows brush, which we'll get to in a little bit, but we'll go ahead and start with the shaper brush. We use this brush to draw the shapes. It's got a nice soft edge, which is exactly what we want as we're creating this fur. You could also do this with one of the air brushes that is built in, but this brush has a nice texture that I really like. We'll just go ahead and color in the edges of this and then fill it all in. We've got that all done. Then we're going to go ahead and open up the Layers panel. We're going to create a new layer, and we're going to actually put this layer behind, below the previous layer. This layer will be for his little paws that are on the other side. We're going to go back to the Layers and we're going to create another new layer for the face. This layer is going to be above the body layer, and for the color, we're going to choose just a lighter gray color. Then we'll go ahead and color in his little face. Perfect. Now we're ready to start adding the fur. We're going to go back to the layer with the body, and then we're going to use the Eyedropper tool to select that color. For this sloth, we're going to be using the combed texture. So go ahead and select the combed brush, it's just the regular one, not the light or the dark, and we're going to be using this to add all the edge texture. We're using short strokes to add texture to all the edges to make this guy look furry. You want to be sure to add this texture in making sure to pay attention to the direction that the fur is going. Up here near his head, it's not quite as fluffy, so I'll use less pressure to make shorter hair, and over on his arm, I'm making these up and down motions to have the hair curve over. Then it sticks out on the bottom of his arm. We'll do his tummy and his other leg. You can come back and make it as free as you want. Just keep adding strokes until it's as fluffy as you'd like it to be. I think that looks pretty good. Now that we've got our fur edge all done, we're going to go back to the Layers panel and we're going to swipe to the right with two fingers to turn on Alpha Lock. You can confirm here in the menu that Alpha Lock is turned on. Now we're going to do the shading, which is going to give it the fur texture. We're going to start with the dark version of the combed brush. Now, this brush has a self darkening effect, where every time you lay down a brushstroke, it will just get darker and darker the more that you layer on the strokes. We're going to start by adding the dark texture. Basically we're just adding in dark strokes that follow the direction of the fur that we've already established. Pay special attention to make sure that all of your strokes are going in the direction of the fur that you want them to. We're basically going to do this over the whole body, just to give it some overall texture to start. I'm going to go over the top of his head, wrapping around his little face over on the arm. We're using this fur to add a little bit of contouring to the arm. Then we'll finish filling in the whole body. I'm using these flicking motions to do all the strokes of fur. Now we've got like a base texture on the whole body. I'm just going to come in and darken where the shadows might be. I'm going to assume that the lighting is coming in from this direction, so there would be shadows on the other side of his body. So on the underside, the side of the leg, the side of the arm. You want to go darker than you think it's going to be, and I know he's looking really dark, but that's okay because we're going to come back in with the highlights and it's going to look just fine. That looks good. Let's go ahead and move on to the highlights. Let's go to the Brushes panel and we're going to choose the light version of the combed brush. Then select that. We'll be using this to add the highlights. This is where it gets fun and you really start to see the fur texture. I like to start on the undermost side of the fur and then work my way up. That's what you'll see me do here. Here where it's really dark, I'm adding some really light strokes just to add a little bit of texture to these shadows, so it's not just completely black. Then I'm going to start adding some heavier marks as we work our way upwards. I can even add some strokes that have some wavy directions, which will look like long hair. Again, I'm starting downwards and working my way upwards. There's going to be some nice shiny highlights on the top of his head. So I'm just going to layer a bunch of strokes on there until it looks as bright as I want it to. The more that I come in and layer on strokes, it's going to make the fur look a bit shiny and make it stand out a bit more. Where the brightest spots, where the light might be hitting all, make those areas a little bit brighter, despite layering on more strokes. He's got a lot of texture going on here. He's got these cool or wavy spots. I might tone down the shadows just a little bit by putting on a few more strokes. But if I want to darken other spots of it, like over here on this side, I actually have a special brush for just that, and it's at the bottom of the set and it's called shadows. If you noticed, I haven't changed the color at all. That's the beauty of these brushes. All the lightening and darkening is automatic. Sticking with the same color for the shadows brush, I'll make the size a bit bigger, and then I'm just very lightly coming in and just darkening these areas just a little bit if I just want to make it have a little bit more shadows without adding any more fur strokes. Especially over here in the part, it's going to be a bit darker. The darker you make it the deeper that part is going to look, but I think that looks pretty good. Before we move on to the face, I'm going to go ahead and do these little paws that are on the other side. Go up to Layers menu and choose the layer with a little paws on it. Then again we're going to go over to our brushes and start with just the combed brush. Then we're going to just add some texture to the edges of the paws. We're repeating the same steps that we were doing before. Then we're going to go to Layers and turn on Alpha Lock, and just like before, we're going to add some strokes in the direction of the fur. I'm layering on more strokes towards the bottom of this because there would be a shadow there. I'll go ahead and zoom in on this one so you can see it a little bit more. I'm just layering on strokes in the direction of the fur, and making it really dark towards the bottom. Then I'm going to go ahead and get the light brush, and I'll maybe make that brush size a little bit smaller and add some light strokes to it as well. I'm adding a little bit of highlights to the bottom and then some more intense highlights at the top. We'll make sure to do highlights on the other side as well, and there you go. 6. The Hairy Sloth: Part 2 - Face: His body is looking pretty good, lets go ahead and start working on the face. We'll go to the layer with the face. We're going to actually use a different brush for the face. He's got shorter hair on his face so we are going to use the brush called short hair. Again, starting with just the plain brush, not the darker light. We're going select the color that his face is. Let's zoom in so we can see what we're doing. We're going to go ahead and add some fur texture to the edges of the shape. Here I'm just trying to blend in this new texture in with the fur texture that we've already got going on so they look like they blend together. I'm trying to do the same direction that I already did for the other fur. That's looking pretty good. Now let's go to the layers and we will turn on alpha lock. You can see that it's turned on there. We're going to go to the brushes panel and we're going to use this short hair dark brush. I want to make sure, again, to establish the direction that all the fur is going to go so I'm going to start where his nose is, start on the underside of his face. Then I'm going to go up and go around his little eye area. I'm Just doing really light strokes, lots and lots of little light strokes. I'm starting really light. I'm not making it too dark yet, building up the texture in the darkness as I go. Now, I'm going to darken it a bit more, especially down on the underside of his face. We'll make the brushes a little bit bigger, it'll help me out. Again, it's okay to go darker than you think it needs to be because we're going to come back and add the highlights and lighten it up. We're going to go ahead and do the eyes now. I left those to do separately. I'm just going to fill in that area overall and then layer on lots and lots of strokes until that area is as dark as I want it to be. I'll go ahead and do the other side as well. Just layer on strokes until that area is just as dark as I would like it to be. Now I've got the little patches over his eyes, nice and dark. Let's go ahead and switch over to our light brush. I'm going to start up here and just add in little strokes until it gets to be as light as I would like it to be. I'm going to go ahead and do some on the bottom as well. I'm just going to add some light strokes just to lighten it up and add that texture, and I'm going to add some very light strokes here over the eye area. I think I might come in with a dark brush and darken that up a bit more or I can also come in with the shadow brush and I can darken it up that way. One thing to note is that the darker the color selected is, the more intense it's going to make your shadows. If you have a dark color it's going to get dark really fast, but if you have a light color value selected, the darkening is going to be much more gradual. That's how you can control the intensity of the lightning or darkening effect. The area where the nose is is dark, so I'm going to just darken that up a little bit as well. Then I can even come in with the fur dark brush and add a little bit more texture to that. That is all there is for the fur of the sloth. The only other thing left to do would be to add in everything else, like his face, and his claws in the tree. I'm going to go ahead and do that. To finish my drawing, I'm going to be using brushes from Miguash paint box. The brush I'm using right now is called Painty Round and you can actually get this brush for free. It was included in Procreate's All Star brush pack. I have a brush included there along with a bunch of other amazing brush makers. I'll put a link to that in the description. I'm just going to go ahead and speed this process up because I want to get to teaching you guys more about how to do some more fur textures. He's all done. I'm just going to turn off my sketch layer and I think he turned out to be pretty adorable. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to draw a fluffy texture. 7. The Fluffy Llama: Our next animal illustration is going to be the llama. A llama has a very fluffy fur texture. I'm excited to show you how to do that next. Let's go back to the gallery and we are going to get to work on our llama. I'm going to use this llama to show you how to do a fluffy texture. Again, we've got our sketch set up. We're going to go into the Start Here layer to start drawing. I'm going to start by adding a background color because I'm going to make the llama white and it's hard to see when you have a white background. I'm going to choose a dark navy blue. Then for the color, we're going to go into the yellowy oranges and choose a light toby gray color. We're going go over to the brushes and we're going to go back to our fur and fluff set, and we are going to choose the fluff brush. I'm noticing it's a little hard to see the sketch, I'm going to actually turn the opacity just a little bit. For this one, I'm just going to go ahead and draw the shape using the fluff brush. I could have done it with the shape for brush and added bluff to the edge, but with this particular brush, it's easy enough just to paint the whole thing with that brush. I'm going around the edges, making sure they look nice and textured, and then I'm going to color in the whole center of it as well. We can even make it a little more fluffy if you want, just lightly add some strokes around the edge. You can make it as fluffy as you want. The softer you make the edges look, the more fluffy here your animal's going to look. Then I can't forget his little beard right up here on top of his head between the ears. Let's do the legs too. We're going to create a new layer and we're going to put it behind the body layer. I'm just going to color those in with my fluff brush and make more fluffy. Great. We've got the shape of the body and the legs all done, it's nice and fluffy. Let's go back to the body layer. We're going to turn on Alpha lock just like before. Then we're going to select the dark fluff brush. I'm just using light circular motion to add some overall texture to everything. Every time you pick up your pencil, it's going to get darker. Down here at the bottom where I want it to get nice and dark, I'm layering on lots of different strokes. It's harder to tell in the video, but I'm lifting up my pencil every so often to make it darker. For this piece, I'm going to have the light coming in from the same side as the sloth, so I want to make sure we put some shadows on his neck. It's looking pretty good. I'm just going to make his underside a little bit darker. Now I'm ready to come in with the light brush and add the highlights. Let's select the fluff light brush and do the same thing. Start at the bottom and add a little bit of highlights to those dark areas, and then as we go up, we're just going to add way more light areas. It's very irregular looking that's going to give it that fluffy effect. Another thing I like to do is reduce the size of the brush and just come in and make some little wavy fur marks to give it a little bit of some bright spots on the fur. Then I can even come in with the dark brush and darken up some areas again if I need to. We've got a fluffy looking llama. Let's go ahead and do the same thing to the legs, we'll go to the Layers panel and we'll turn on Alpha lock. We have our dark brush selected, so we're going to go ahead and layer on some strokes to make these legs look darker, especially right where they're behind the body. Again, we're making it darker than we need to because we're going to come in and add the highlights back in. Now we're going to go get the light brush. Again, in little circular motions, we're going to add some highlights. Now we've got our fluffy looking llama. I'm going to go ahead and finish this drawing up by painting in the head and legs. I'm creating a new layer to do all that. You can finish it off with whatever brushes you'd like to use. I'm going to be using the painty round from my [inaudible] paint box again. I'll go ahead and speed that process up so we can show you one more way to make fur. We're just going to add some final shading to that. I see that I forgot to add in his little tail, so I'm just going to go ahead and do that real quick in the same method that we were using for all the other fluff, and this llama is done. In the next video, I'm going to show you one more really cool technique that you can do to make fur using the smudge tool. 8. The Super Soft Duckling: Our last animal illustration is going to be a super soft duckling. For this one, I'm going to be showing you how to do this for a fact, using some built-in procreate brushes and the smudge tool. I have one more technique to show you, and this is going to be using the built-in brushes that come with procreate and the smudge tool. This is pretty cool. Let's go ahead and open up our duckling file. Just like before, we've got the sketch and our Start Here layer. Let's go ahead and choose a nice bright yellow. Then to do the shape of the duck, we're going to use the built-in brushes. We're going to go over to the airbrushing set, and we're going to use the medium brush. I'm just going to go ahead and go around the edges and then fill in the center just like before. Again, it's important to have a brush that has a nice soft edge which will be perfect when we're adding all the fluffy texture to the edges. We're going to do the arms. Next, we're going to create a new layer and put it below the body layer. Then just fill in those arms. Because this yellow is a little hard to see on the white, I'm going to go ahead and change the background color to a nice blue. Let's go back to layers and we're going to select the body layer. We're going to turn on Alpha lock because we're going to add some shading to this before we do the fur texture. I'm going to select the soft airbrushed to add the shading. We're going to choose a color that's a little bit darker, a little warmer, and start softly painting in the shading. I would highly recommend looking at a reference photo if you're not sure where to put the shading, but I'm going to darken his little underside here. The lightest part on him would be where his chest puffs out. Then a little bit of darkening on his neck and where his bill meets his head. I'm just going to layer on darker and darker shades each time I'm adding a little bit of darkness to make color and also a little bit of redness to it. After I've done all the shadows, I'm going to go ahead and add some highlights. I'm choosing this middle yellow and then I'm choosing a lighter version of that and brushing on some highlights onto the duckling's chest and top of his head. Then I also need to add a little bit of shading to the wings. I'm going to go ahead and turn Alpha lock on that layer. Then in the same way, choosing a darker, more redder version of the yellow, I'm going to add a little bit of shadows where the wings touch the body. Now, I'm going to go back to the body layer and we're actually going to turn off Alpha lock because now we're going to use the smudge tool to add the initial fur texture. I'll select the smudge tool and the brush I'm going to be using is from the touchups set, and it's called flowing hair. Now, I'm going to use that smudge brush to pull out the hair texture from one color to the next. I'm starting at the bottom. Then I'm pulling each lighter color into the darker color. I hope that makes sense, but I'm starting near the bottom, pulling down a little bit, then going a little higher and pulling down a little bit more. I'm paying attention to, again, the direction of the fur. Up here on the head, I want the fur to curve around although feathers more than fur, but baby ducks are furry. Forgive me for that. What's cool about this technique is, you can do it with any of the other fur brushes, you can smudge them out. It will just give you a totally different texture depending on what kind of brush you'll use. You can use dry brushes, you can get an effect like this where you can smudge things. It's a pretty fun thing to play around with. Go through and smudge everything until it looks nice and fluffy. Then I'm going to actually paint on some more fur texture. I'm going to choose a color that's a little bit lighter than the darkest color. Choose the flowing hair brush as my brush. This time, we're going to use the brush, not the smudge tool, and then I'm just going to add in a few little strokes. This will give it a little bit more volume, a little bit more texture. I'm layering on a little bit of darker strokes onto the light areas, but a lot of it is adding light strokes over the dark areas. You can do this as much as you want until you get the texture that you want. I'm just going to go over the neck. I'm going to do the head, blend on some strokes there, add in some lighter strokes as well. It's not perfect, but you get the idea. Now, we're going to go ahead and do his arms. We're going to turn off Alpha lock on that layer, and then I'm going to go ahead and grab my smudge tool, which is already set to the flowing hair brush and I'm just going to smudge the dark into the light and smudge the edges out to make them look fluffy. We've got a fluffy ducky body. I'm going to go ahead and finish this little duckling app. I'm using my painting round brush again and I'm going to go ahead and paint his legs and his bill and all the other details. This duckling is all done. He is super fluffy and super cute. 9. Conclusion: Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope that you've had a lot of fun and are making some really cool fury recreations. Don't forget to share your project below so that we can all learn and grow together. Thanks and happy art making. 10. Additional Time Lapses: Right? Yes. Okay. Okay. Yeah. He doesn't speak. Two. Now try saying these sentences. Take risks. Okay.