Drawing a Pug's Wrinkly Fur in Coloured Pencils
- catrinmemberyart
- Mar 20
- 2 min read
I have just finished two pet portraits for a client of a Pug x Brussels Griffon dog called Bonnie.
With her being a crossbreed, as you can see in the portraits, she doesn’t have the deep wrinkles you usually see with pugs, but I still approached her drawings in a similar way.
Wrinkly fur really isn’t as daunting as it initially looks once you know the right techniques.
I started by lightly drawing in the darkest patches of fur, in what looks like her ‘eyebrows’, and underneath her eyes, drawing in the fur direction.
To draw her fur and wrinkles, I created an even base layer of coloured pencil on the whole section of fur, including the lightest areas and the wrinkles. For this step you’ll need to identify the lightest colour you can see in the dog’s fur - this is usually a pale cream or light grey depending on the dog’s colour.
Once I had started to build up the fur colours, using a slightly harder pressure and a darker pencil I began adding in the wrinkles.
It’s important to focus on the direction of the fur, and use short, ‘flicky’ pencil strokes for the fur to look natural. These are drawn in the shape of little pointy triangles (just without the 3rd side!)
For dogs with deep wrinkles, such as pugs, shar-peis, and bulldogs, you need to focus more on contrast and shadows, as the folds appear much darker in comparison to their fur colour.
For Bonnie’s portraits, I used the same techniques, but just needed lighter browns for her gorgeous wrinkles!
You can practice wrinkly fur by following my free, real-time tutorial on YouTube.
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Thanks for the detail here. I've been looking for more information on the specifics of pet portraits.