Realistic Leopard Fur

This is a pretty easy tutorial that will teach you how to make some realistic leopard fur. The only part that is hard about this tutorial is painting the leopard spots on the canvas. Keep in mind that this technique can be applied to any painted pattern to create a nice fur texture. Let’s get started!

Let’s start small. Make a 200(w) x 100(h) pixel canvas.

Set your foreground to a dark brown and set your background to a light brownish color.

Now flood fill your canvas with the background color and then select a hard brush. I used a 16px brush.

Here comes the part that isn’t liked by many. You’re going to paint some random shaped (and sized) spots like a leopards. The key is to sort of make them fit together and not to make them all the same size. Make sure they vary in size, shape, and distance between each other. Look below for an example.

Good good. Now we’re going to add the effect of individual peices of hair. This will be done in two steps of which are really easy.

The first step to making the peices of hair go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise > Amount: 7% > Gaussian > Monochromatic

Okay, now the hard part is over. Here comes the fast easy parts.

We’re going to blur the spots a little. It will give the effect of “Look! I didn’t paint these on here!” :P So let’s go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur > Radius: 1.0 PX

Now the second step, Filter > Blur > Motion Blur > Angle: 37? > Distance: 5 PX

There you have it! :D