Lumisa wrote:
I was more after painting over the whole body of the model...and that makes it hard with all those curves of the body and shadow changes etc...

Ultimately, hand tuning or painting is what it comes down to, but there are some things which will help get you much closer much more quickly.

Take a flat representation of your texture--the animal pattern--and use a displacement map based on the brightness of your subject to distort it. Then use liquify to further refine the shaping. There are a lot of tutorials online for displacement maps; this one is a good intro.

Kevin_Connery wrote:

Ultimately, hand tuning or painting is what it comes down to, but there are some things which will help get you much closer much more quickly.

Take a flat representation of your texture--the animal pattern--and use a displacement map based on the brightness of your subject to distort it. Then use liquify to further refine the shaping. There are a lot of tutorials online for displacement maps; this one is a good intro.

+1

I like doing it manually, but just because I love to do things the HARD way - masochist retoucher.

Natalia_Taffarel wrote:
I like doing it manually, but just because I love to do things the HARD way - masochist retoucher.

Yeah, well, you can get away with it because you're talented (and patient). Us hacks what gots no artistic skills tend to use the mechanical help--it's the only way we can keep from falling too far behind.

Seriously, I'd love to be able to do what some of the better retoucher/illustrators can do by hand, but I simply haven't got the skills.