I've no idea how to do time lapse I'm afraid, but what you would have seen, was disaster, disaster, disaster..... suddenly goes right!
What I do is make a tracing of the dog in AR, marking where the colour changes are as well as eyes, nose placement etc. Then on a separate layer I do an underpainting using the tracing feature in AR. This looks like a hideous blob, but the colours provide a good base. Then on a new layer I start laying down the fur and just build and build the fur in layers. I do the eyes and nose on a separate layer as I can then make sure they look right, and finally merge all layers. I keep flipping the tracing on and off for accuracy and use the reference image a lot. This picture wasn't quite finished, I put the finished one in the Gallery. The mouth wasn't quite right here, so there it looks better :-)