Triz... sometimes, but not all that often... I never 2did like the effect they left me with when doing fur or hair. Fur is easy: *uses her rum Pirate to show*
the silver fur starts out as a base of medium grey slathered on at a 19 sized paint brush. Normal circle. Then after multiplying the brush setting, I slather on the shadowing. Same layer... (I'm lazy, so very rarely will I do cell shading X) ) Same size paint brush. Then I change the setting to soft light and slather that on (makes the grey areas lighter) Now the darker your base colors are, you'll have to chose a lighter veriant on the palet for it to work. So after you've got a mess, you take the blur tool (usually also at the 19 circle size) and run it all over the fur to smoth/blend it all together. (Shirlee's an examble of what that looks like) Sometimes afterwards I need to do touch ups on areas to keep it looking good... and not a mush.
Now for the fur.. sometimes it works... sometimes it doesn't... (Didn't look good on Shirlee... so I left it) I set it at size one, just because any bigger and it'll look weird =( Doing this takes.. a lot of luck, and maybe some skill... X) Just run the nib over the fur quickly, and with the curv of the limb/body/tail/head... sometimes to get it mussy you go over the area in a different angle... you can make nice flare effects with it as well, like with chest fur areas... once your done, you erase the color that is outside of the fur lines.. eye areas, nose.. clothing...
The hair I do is kinda simple... On a different layer, I slather on a base color. (Brown as you can see for the rum pirate) then change the size of the brush to 3, multiply the color and start drawing in the strands and darken areas.. once satisfied with that, I change the color to the lightest brown on the pallet and the brush setting to soft light. Then I ad in the highlights of the hair strants... even changing the color to yellow and red to add in the different shades of highlights that are in hair.. (since SilverCougar has my hair, I use that as a guide.. And I have gold and copper strands within the brown X) )
Sometimes with shirts and towels... er.. not wanting to break rules... *links this one* We all like the towel... yes... the towel is our friend... *ehem* The towel is done much the same way, slathering on base/shadow/highlight then blurblended... but you can use a nice little filter to give it it's "terry cloth" effect by using the "smudge stick" filter... just play around with it's settings till it looks right to you.
=( I rambled... I'm sorry heh.. Was trying to answer Triz's question as best as possible...
thank you very much, silvercougar! And i hope you don't mind, i added your picture to my fanart page!
Just padding through your world