Dexter

I recently had the pleasure of drawing this gorgeous Border Collie. If you follow me on social media you’ll know that black fur is one of my favourite fur colours to draw. I love how it requires multiple layers, focusing on contrast and using colours like blues and purple to enhance the fur even further. If you’d like to read a few of my top tips for drawing realistic black fur scroll down 🙂

Tips for drawing black fur in pastels

I created a YouTube video on my top tips for drawing black fur. It demonstrates the most important considerations when trying to achieve photorealistic portraits. If you’d like to watch this hit the button at the bottom of this post. 

The one thing that will make or break a dog portrait like this is contrast. If the shadows are not dark enough we end up creating a grey dog rather than a black dog. Often, we are to afraid of going to dark in case we cannot then lighten it back up. The great thing with pastels is we can layer light over dark and it’s such a forgiving medium. My biggest tip is go for it. Try it out on a spare scrap piece of your paper of choice and see how you like it. I focus far more on contrast than colour.

I have lots of voice over videos on YouTube and slower, often real time tutorials on Patreon. These Patreon tutorials are up to 6 or so hours long so they really do cover everything in detail at every stage. From base layers to final details I include everything. No hidden secrets. If I make a mistake I’ll show how to correct it so that should anyone following along experience the same they know how to correct it.