I find graphite very suited for doing fur because you can easily mimic with a pencil the nature of fur. When I draw fur I concentrate on three things which are direction, length and texture. A good way to learn to draw wolves is to study and draw domestic dogs first.
My main reference picture was taken from the wonderful national geographic web sit ( http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/anim...now_image.html)
As with all my reference material I try not to slavishly copy them but try to put my own spin on them. I also try to use more then one reference photo.
My drawing paper size is A3 (11.7× 16.5 inches) 135gsm Cartridge paper.
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At this stage I am just trying to get my proportions right and getting the fur directions and length correct. Only using an HB pencil at this stage.
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Next I concentrated on the eyes. For me once you have the eyes right the rest of the portrait will fall into place. B6 pencil used for the pupils
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This is a detailed shot of one of the eyes to give you rough idea of how I did the fur. As you can see I use an arrow head pattern to get the realistic feel of fur. When doing fur I mainly use a HB 0.5 mechanical pencil
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I next worked on the ears and the nose area. Wolf’s ears have a lot of long fine white hairs which overlap the darker areas of their ears, so a lot of negative drawing is called for. I also add a wash of HB pencil to the sides of the head to add a little more depth to the face.
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At this stage the drawing is almost finished. I add highlights to the body fur with a kneaded easer to give it that thick chunky look. As for the background, I tried to create the impression of ground and sky and let the imagination do the rest.
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After a night of sleep I came back to the drawing and decided I needed to add more darker shading on the bottom left-hand side of the body. Did this mainly using a B6 graphite stick.
So there it is, hope you enjoyed. I did not write this as a tutorial just wanted to show people how I do things as I know how much I enjoy it when others show how they do things
