Siberian Husky

Your drawing is so impressive. I can almost see the a 3D pop-out snout! How do you do that? By applying blur to the behind objects while keeping the front part/ muzzle in mask?

Nope, I didn't use blur or mask anything. I mostly did each major part as a separate layer ― ears, face, muzzle, body ― and slowly built it up. Once I'm satisfied with the undercoat, I merged all the corgi layers together and kept building up. Using multiple layers is great since you can adjust opacity to play around with the fur as well. I did that for the body base fluff and I think the ears.

Apparently, they were also testing custom brushes, but I'm not sure how that'd work in Corel. I was away for that class and only got to see a mini-review of it. It just helped speed-up the process of creating the basic fur texture.

Anyhoo, I just had my review today and here's some other tips that were given:

• Focus on the face area! That's where people will look at the most. ― just a note, we had to get pictures with more of the face showing toward the viewer. 3/4 views are ideal in all situations of drawing.
  
• If you have most of your fur texture done, but the image isn't dark or light enough, don't fret! Create a new layer set to multiply to darken or screen to lighten and use a really fuzzy soft air brush with low flow to do some touch-ups.
  
• Remember to try your best to go from dark to light.
  
• When doing the finer, longer strands of hair after roughing it in, add more differently placed, smaller hairs of various colours. Erase some of the hairs so they fade in, mostly from the starting area, so it blends in. This will help to make it look less monotonous.
  
• When something is really glossy, like shines in the eyes, it's usually more crisp/sharp.
  
• You can adjust the background to help show finer details. In some of the other students' images, the fur blended in with the background or the background helped pop up details.

Just one more little note, the original res of my image is 3100 x 2500 px at 300DPI. The min height/width size for our assignments has to be 2500px.