You can make a real feature of the eyes - If it has black rims then you can make them look smooth and make a real feature out of any water that has collected at the base of the eyeball. Play up the texture of the nose, it's form, make the most of highlights. The same goes for gum detail and flews. Lay it on thick and enjoy yourself drawing everything except hair!

The hair is probably only going to be important in the coloured area around the eye - perhaps around the nose where it changes direction - where it meet the top lip and probably overhangs it a little.

I other words - don't worry about the hair at all. Concentrate instead on getting the shading correct to give it form then add emphasised touches of hair, as I explained. This will give the viewer's eye the clues that it needs to understand the texture of everything white - with just a few clues and a few subtle shadows around white hairs it will read the whole dog as being hairy.

I've got a Bull Terrier drawing that I had the same problem with. When I've time I'll scan it and post some bits of here so you can get an idea of what I'm trying to say. (Of course I may have talked myself into a corner here -- my memory of this terrier might not have anything to do with what I was talking about )

Finally, you need to think about how you are going to give a hard edge to the dog - it being white on white paper. Personally I usually invent some false lighting that allows me to round the edges off a little and add a faint shadow...... in the meantime here's a low-res version I just found.

MIKE

www.SibleyFineArt.com
www.Starving-Artists.net

This is the head of that Bull Terrier and I had to leave the background white as the drawing was one of a matching series. I'm surprised to see that I included more detail than I remembered. But I have left plenty of virgin white areas and kept the "hairs" white - you'll see that none of the hairs are actually drawn, just the shadows that they create. When you contrast this to the positive-drawn areas such as the nose and eyes, this just serves to make the white appear even whiter. Whatever method you choose, so long as it reads as a "white" dog then that's all that matters.

This is scanned from a print and I've balanced it as closely as I can to the printed image. The original itself would look a little softer and more subtle.

Basically you need to work both ways -- negative drawing (drawing the shadows, not the hairs) for the white areas and positive drawing for the key coloured areas. For the latter you could also use negative drawing (or a mixture of negative and positive) then apply an overlaying range of tones to "colour" the non-white hairs and to give it a sense of three-dimensional form.

MIKE

www.SibleyFineArt.com
www.Starving-Artists.net

I've been reading up on your tips for drawing white hair/fur - your bull terrier is a good example for me to study, examine and try out. I do have a question - do you indent along areas where the white hairs overlap darker regions like inside the ears, around the mouth or nose?

"We must become the change we want to see" - Gandhi