Painting with the mixer brush, or any digital painting, has one disadvantage if you are going for a photo-realistic effect; the painting smudges and softens the pixels. The entire process is counter intuitive to keeping things sharp. I think this is one of the reason why many of the current painters scoring well at image competitions are using a soft pastel color palette or dark shadowy scenes in their work. The original image sharpness is gone. And a light, bright vivid colors would exaggerate this point.
But I like vivid color, especially in my wildlife images. Nature is bright and beautiful. So I keep trying different ways to paint them and still keep some of the sharpness and realism in the fur.
This time, I tried something a little different. I painted it twice and blended those painted layers with a low opacity copy of the original cutout. By painting twice, I get extra depth in the fur because the brush strokes on different layers are not the same. Here was my process in summary.
