This is a progress sequence for Fat Buddha Fox, which I had drawn for Rovest.

The body was originally facing the same direction as the head, but I lost the image for that, which is why the first one is just a head.

Also it's much easier to tell here that I attempted to use an actual fox to make the texture for the color layer, but that didn't pan out.

For the sphere, each sample I made, I attempted to apply to a surface facing the same direction, this gave a good estimate of what the lighting would be in that spot. Once I had done the whole body, I worked in the details.

I combined the color and lighting with a multiply layer. Everyone does this. But it made the result a little dark, so I added an adjustment layer to pull the bright areas back out. You can see what multiply does to your images in that histogram.