UPDATE 9/17/15

I've had a lot of questions about drawing fluffy pets, and I am not surprised because it is definitely more difficult! There is not one right way to do this, but you definitely want to avoid making your pet look like a bowl of spaghetti by drawing every single strand of hair! I'm going to show you my method here. You can also study other illustrators drawings of fluffy pets to see how they do it.

Meet Yodle the Yorkie. He is a fictional illustration I completed for a manufacturing client recently:

So I used the same method on this that I did when I illustrated my dog Midji, except it requires a bit more digital painting for the fur. To streamline this mini tute I'm just going to show you the process for his face and not his body. Step one was to create a base illustration of his rough shape:

Next I added his facial features and some rough shading to give him some structure. The general method that I use to show fluff is to add shading and highlights that look like fur strands. So where you would normally have shading add some darker fur strokes. :

Don't be afraid to layer on some even darker strokes:

Next I added some highlights using a couple of layers of lighter colored strokes:

And of course don't forget the accessories!

I hope this is helpful to those of you with fluffy furbabies!

-Anne

ORIGINAL PROJECT

This is my dog, Midji, who I am very obsessed with. She is my favorite thing to illustrate in the whole world.

Here are a few sketches I did of her. The last one is the one I ended up picking to illustrate.

And here is my final illustration of her!