How to shade fur?

[Pusty]

Well I'm really no good at shading hair haha

Well I was trying to pixel something as I haven't in a while and while doing so I came to realise that it looks completely unfinished if I don't shade it.
And as I have no clue about material shading in general I though it would be something worth asking. (Although I tried as you can see on my pathetic fur shading try)
Note that this means that this isn't finished in any way and I'm well aware of some issues with copying my reference. (But as it's late I though why not post it and after some feedback work on it. Given that someone gives feedback lol)

So I would be happy if someone takes their time to tell me how I should do this. Of course every other critic is appreciated as well ^^



Reference:
Spoiler

[Decroded]

Tricky at this scale.
Double ur canvas and enforce the light source, exaggerate it beyond the reference.
Once u get to this point don't render every bit of fur, simply disrupt the edges of the groups of colour that represent light and dark...

[Ambivorous]

Hey, Pusty. Glad to see you're keeping on and doing some reference studies.

Decroded is quite right.
I took the honours of enforcing a light source (using the reference).



Trick to fur is that you have large clumps of fur one colour and make the edges a little spiky to imply the fur.

[Pusty]

Thanks for your responses!

@Decroded
I see but I can't really imagine it hmm. Also I wanted to make it this small as a practice. I might want to look into it later

@Ambivorous
Thanks for you edit! It helped me quite a bit.


Well at least I think it's better than before ^^

[Ambivorous]

Much better, Pusty! Keep in mind that contrast for all your pieces.
I'd even suggest doing some value studies to get used to how light and dark things really are.

One thing though, the fur on the chest is suffering from an embossed effect. It looks like it's flat in the middle basically. Don't just use the middle value colour to separate the bright and dark. Sometimes those meet and sometimes there is no middle value. Look at my edit where the dark and light are sometimes touching. Let that happen.

[Pusty]

Thank you! How would you do value studies tho' is what I'm asking myself. Sounds interesting


Hmm I'm not too sure if this is better. But I think I made the contrast bigger

[Ambivorous]

Liking the extra contrast. This version has much more volume. Well done!
Does feel like a different time of day and doesn't match the reference image, but those things don't matter. It's all about that volume.

So value studies are simple. Take an image, make it greyscale (use perceptual greyscaling if possible), and then copy it. Don't use the colour picker and keep your images separate. Then just draw what you see in what brightness you see it. Limit yourself to one hour or some similar size chunk you can easily manage.
The idea is to remove the confusion of hue and saturation from the mix and just focus on the values/brightness. IRL saturation and hue affect value, so perceptual greyscaling takes that into account.

Here is an album with all of my value studies using the fancy new BB code.

Spoiler

[imgur]Sqei1[/imgur]

Sometimes they suck, and sometimes they are incomplete, and I didn't do mine every day because I'm naughty, but keep it up and you will become amazing. To help, post in The Daily Sketch for extra motivation.

[Pusty]

Thank you very much for your help! I'm gonna try this in the next time. Looks like I can learn much from it.


Well I did some work on it and I think it's quite good so if noone as any critic anymore I will call it finsihed (Although I'm always happy to hear more) ^^

(Also thanks to PixelPiledriver for editing my post as I haven't even realised that I used just the link thingy and not the one for images lol)

[Decroded]

Still needs work.
There are jaggy clusters and the eyes have become muddy and blurred.
But to fix that i think u should adress the colours first as they are tied in that (clusters nteract differently when colours are changed meaning have to re-asses).

Overall the orange looks too saturated.
But what ilike to aim for is varying levels of saturation and "contrast" (differences in h/s/b between clusters).
Ambivorous nailed some really nice colours IMO.
Certainly this os subjective to tastes and its not the only way to do it but regardless, I'd encourage u to analyze the colours he used there.
U can do this by laying them out in a row and opening colour picker then use eye dropper and pay attention to the jumps in values for HSB.
In addition pay attention to how he clustered and placed these colours next to each other.
Its good to do this alot with lots of nice pixel art references (dont use photos they lie because of noise).

[ptoing]

Gave the furry look a bit of a shot. Not sure if it is super successful, but I think this approach kinda works.

[Decroded]

i just wanna say my comments about the saturation are a bit exaggerated now that i see this on my home monitor (not that its a good monitor).
earlier i was viewing on my phone's amoled screen which oversaturates things.
still i think ambivorious has nice colours 

[Ambivorous]

Well if Decroded is going to toot my horn I guess I owe a more in depth edit.
I don't expect you to make an edit after this, and I think you've done quite well and should put this away as done before you get sick of it.



So I've done a few things here, which could have been achieved in different ways, but just to give you some ideas.

• A lot of my clusters are wide, flat, rhombus shapes to help with the fur/hair feel.
• I overemphasized some of foxy's features to add character. As well as looked at the reference more to get the general pose more accurate.
• I also changed the background to some random thing I haven't organised yet and is very rough, but the idea was that where there are light colours on the edge of the fox I have a dark background to bring them out, and light where there is dark. This is essentially creating an outline using the background. Just makes sure I don't lose any of the details to the plain white of the previous background. It's rough though, so don't judge me too harshly and don't follow it like a bible. I was just trying to give you ideas of things to do.

[Pusty]

@Decroded
I'm going to look into it! So much to do haha
(but with the things you said later I'm kinda confused if I should completely reconfigure my colors haha)

@ptoing
Thank you! I really like it ,so I took some ideas from it

@Ambivorous
As I'm not getting the motivation to work on something for training so often (or at least not as much as I would like to) I quite enjoy working on something while getting so much feedback on it!
Your edit is amazing! I agree with Decroded your colors are awesome! I'm going to look a bit at your background later as it is really good!



Well anyways: Thanks for so much feedback again! I tried somethings not sure how good it is tho'. (Ignore the weird shadow I just forgot to remove it)