For as much as there are improvements in his artwork, he's starting to do like most every other artist seems to do over time. He's reducing the amount of fur detail and making it more skin-like. He still has fluff and fur details, but nowhere near as much fluffy or fur detail as he used to do.
I always saw his art as so much more unique from everyone else for the amount of fluff and fur detail all his artwork had. Not enough artists really make fur look like fur, it's so often just skin looking with minimalistic fur detail.

I know Ru reads comments here, and I hope this post won't get downvoted to oblivion before he can read this.

kacey said:
For as much as there are improvements in his artwork, he's starting to do like most every other artist seems to do over time. He's reducing the amount of fur detail and making it more skin-like. He still has fluff and fur details, but nowhere near as much fluffy or fur detail as he used to do.
I always saw his art as so much more unique from everyone else for the amount of fluff and fur detail all his artwork had. Not enough artists really make fur look like fur, it's so often just skin looking with minimalistic fur detail.

I know Ru reads comments here, and I hope this post won't get downvoted to oblivion before he can read this.

I hope nobody would downvote such a well thought out and politely worded opinion, even if it's not necessarily a positive one!

Honestly I agree. While I do find that too much fur texture can be a bit distracting and take away from the intended effect of a picture (in my opinion), I do also feel like I've been overcompensating and bringing it down too low a bit lately. In fact, I tried changing it up a little bit in a picture I finished today. I will be posting it to FA in the next few days... hopefully it'll be a positive change for those who've been missing the texture a bit.

Rupants said:

Honestly I agree. While I do find that too much fur texture can be a bit distracting and take away from the intended effect of a picture (in my opinion), I do also feel like I've been overcompensating and bringing it down too low a bit lately. In fact, I tried changing it up a little bit in a picture I finished today. I will be posting it to FA in the next few days... hopefully it'll be a positive change for those who've been missing the texture a bit.

I'm glad to hear that! Your mastery of fur texture has always been one of the little touches that made your work immediately identifiable and gave it a certain warmth and atmosphere.

I'm curious: Is this workload-related? Is a pic like this, with a fully furnished but relatively "flat" background and two somewhat less detailed characters simply less work than something like this , with only a single, highly-detailed (those eyes!) character?

Also, unrelated but: Thank you for providing absolute master class furry erotica for all of us for years. Your work has always been a pleasure to appreciate both artistically and erotically. It's even helped shape my sex life. You got me and, subsequently, my boyfriend, into chastity play. Since I'm the subby one, I'm not sure if I should be mad at you or thank you, you magnificent bastard.

SevenfoldSymmetry said:
I'm glad to hear that! Your mastery of fur texture has always been one of the little touches that made your work immediately identifiable and gave it a certain warmth and atmosphere.

I'm curious: Is this workload-related? Is a pic like this, with a fully furnished but relatively "flat" background and two somewhat less detailed characters simply less work than something like this , with only a single, highly-detailed (those eyes!) character?

Also, unrelated but: Thank you for providing absolute master class furry erotica for all of us for years. Your work has always been a pleasure to appreciate both artistically and erotically. It's even helped shape my sex life. You got me and, subsequently, my boyfriend, into chastity play. Since I'm the subby one, I'm not sure if I should be mad at you or thank you, you magnificent bastard.

Well damn! First of all, thanks for all the kind words. At the end of the day I'm just trying to make stuff people will like, so I'm happy to hear it's been working. :P Hah, and it's particularly interesting when I wake people to new kinks and ideas they didn't know they liked. Have fun in that cage!

Anyway, to answer your question- it's not really workload related. I've been exploring my style in general quite a lot lately and trying different things- going as far as experimenting with different types of paint, and such.

When I look at a lot of the artists whose work I find appealing, they're very often relatively flat and less heavily detailed- I guess I personally find a bit of simplicity works better with smut than going all out. So I try to emulate and learn from them a bit, but as it happens these styles rarely do much in the way of fur texture, and if they do it's almost impossible to replicate the look with watercolors, so as I've been working to get my style more into a place I like I've been struggling to figure out exactly how to go about doing fur texture.

This picture merely represents one end of the spectrum, where I experimented with a bit less texture- though for what it's worth, there's more than it looks like and the scanner ended up eating quite a bit of subtle stuff on the characters. :P

I definitely want a bit more texture than this, but in the long run I just want a relatively 'clean' look, I'm trying to avoid having things look too messy and rough which is a very common issue with watercolours, it seems.