Wolf Fur

[Eyawiin]

Hey
I've been working on this wolf a few hours on and off now and arrived at the stage where i have to add the fur texture to it.
So I looked up some reference photos of real wolves to try and emulate the fur texture to the pixel art piece. however I cant seem to understand how to make it look like fur.
To me it looks like a solid object.



I started out looking up the wolf anatomy and sketched the skeleton of the wolf as you can see in the top left of the picture.
After that I blocked out the different parts of flesh. You can see that in the top right.
Then I made a grey version of the wolf, kinda like a 3d model before the texture is applied. (Bottom Left).
Last I looked up wolf color patterns and tried to color the different parts accordingly.
(Here is the reference image for the colors: http://68.media.tumblr.com/e6e986df9a315833daa46456266880b7/tumblr_inline_n2hnjpBfRr1rpk3gm.jpg)

[astraldata]

Take a look at this thread -- it's at the top of the forums actually: http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=19686.0

That will give you an idea on how to manage fur.

You really can't be picky at this resolution, but you can do dithering in some areas where the fur is more 'rough' or looser or moves toward shadow across, say, the back and side of the torso to the bottom-side of the ribcage. See my animation in that thread and you can see how one might interpret fur in this wolf.

Something that could also help is adding a little more contrast to the light and dark areas of your wolf to give it more of a sense of volume. That will help the 'fuzzy' areas appear even more fuzzy with just one or two dithered pixels. You even did this (possibly inadvertently) on the neck of the bottom-right wolf.