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hey man,

short hair is one of those things that can be a real pain, this is why a lot of artist hate to do wolves, and bears. sometimes it can be overwhelming. what I would do though is to edit the reference photo in photo shop and really bump up the contrast, this will give the hair more texture. when you do your stencil, stenci the highs darks and mid tones the same as you would on a human face portrait. I prefer to use a 9 mag bug pin for most of my work, use just the edge of the mag 2-4 needles, eg. this will give a more realistic hair,with a nice taper as you lay it in. rather than trying to line everything. take advantage of the mid tones and darks, you can shade these and add highlights in key areas to give the illusion that draws you eyes to the details. focus your details on the areas that pop the most. if you try to put every hair in the image it sometimes will look very busy and you may end up flattening the image. the one artist that comes to mind that is amazing at dog black and grey is Andy Engel. take a close look on his facebook page of his dog b&g work, when you look at the picture as a whole it looks very realistic, but if you look closely you see that he does not put every hair in , but rather combine shading with perfect highlighting to really make the image pop. hope that helps bro. take care

stephen stacey