Painting with the mixer brush, or any digital painting, has one disadvantage if you are going for a photo-realistic effect; the painting smudges and softens the pixels.  The entire process is counter intuitive to keeping things sharp.  I think this is one of the reason why many of the current painters scoring well at image competitions are using a soft pastel color palette or dark shadowy scenes in their work.  The original image sharpness is gone.  And a light, bright vivid colors would exaggerate this point.

But I like vivid color, especially in my wildlife images.  Nature is bright and beautiful.  So I keep trying different ways to paint them and still keep some of the sharpness and realism in the fur.

This time, I tried something a little different.  I painted it twice and blended those painted layers with a low opacity copy of the original cutout.  By painting twice, I get extra depth in the fur because the brush strokes on different layers are not the same.  Here was my process in summary.