Pen and ink is an excellent medium for depicting animals with a lot of linear qualities, like long fur or wrinkled skin. You can use dip pens to build up tone using line techniques, or you can paint in tone with brushes. Before beginning a finished work, practice the different strokes that you'll need
Shaggy fur isn't as easy to draw or paint as it might seem. It's more than simply scribbling a few lines on the page; in order to make fur that looks realistic ... ... you have to be able to see the overall shapes and then to pick out the few details that make the
Short fur, especially from a distance, may not look like fur at all. Animals such as giraffes, horses, and some dogs have such short fur that the bone and muscle structure is easily seen beneath it ... ... which makes accurate drawing essential, since you can't disguise mistakes with shaggy lines. Short fur is depicted
Feathers are delicate and highly intricate up close... ... but in drawing pictures of birds you can rarely see more than a block of smooth pattern with perhaps a feather or two visible in the wings and tail. The difficulty, then, is learning how to depict realistic feathers with the right amount of detail.
Drawing and painting black fur presents a special challenge in that, so often, very little detail is visible and the animal looks like two eyes floating in a black blob. This is especially the tendency if the subject is poorly lit and if you're working from photographs, which tend to flatten tones and decrease subtle