Draw your own hair

Draw your own hair - part 1

step 1


When you start from scraps, it'll be nice to make a quick drawing to fit your hair.
The implantation of the hair will be on the red line, 45° from the ear to the forehead. Also draw the general shape of the hair



step 2

Use
your Pen tool (P) to define the shape and fill it with a MIDTONE color.
If you wich to do black hairs, don't put a pure black color, or you'll
have problems for burning and dodging later.

Mine will be red hair, so I choose a tone not too light and not to dark.




step 3

Basics
for hair is starting ugly and make them nice. For all the process, your
best friend will be Smudge Tool (R). Blur tool is forbiden here.

Make a new layer.
Take a small paintbrush (3' here) with a color a little bit darker than your shape's color.
Make strokes following the shape of the head.

Notice that in real life, hair don't follow always the same direction from one lock from one to another. (See examples)

Do the same, this time with a lighter color.




step 4

Now smudge the stokes, always keeping in mind the direction of the locks.

Here, I selected the basic shape so my strokes don't go everywhere.



step 5

Now, I gonna focus on the highlights of the hair.
Take a small brush again and repeat step 3, where the highlights should
be. You can do it on a new layer and with differents colors (always
light)

Draw your own hair - part 2

step 6


Now repeat step 4 with Smudge tool and you should have something like that.

(Also notce that the tip of the head, where hair start, is always darker)





step 7



Keep repeating those steps until you have something you like.

Put the darker parts of the hair on layers under the lighter parts parts.

I also define the line of the hair






step 8



I'll do the details of darkers parts.

I uncheck the visibility of the basic shape layer and of the highlight layer to work the details better.

Always step 3 and 4, this time with darker color brush.

Take inspiration on pictures if you don't know how are the light sources going on the hair.





step 9


Also fill the transparents parts with darker color and smudge.

You can also burn or dodge parts to make them fit.




step 10

To
enter more the details, you should use a smudge brush that looks like
the one in the picture (little grey part above the hair) to make
strokes like the one on the forehead.

Here, i don't need the basic shape anymore.

Draw your own hair - part 3

step 11

Again, add some strokes and continue. You can use a smaller brush to make your hair look more realistic.

A usefull thing to do is to have the color you need the most in the corner of your drawing.

Here they are starting to be messy, I'll clean that in next step.



step 12

Doing details again.

I'll clean the messy hairs selecting them with Pen Tool and erasing from all the layers.

Then I'll add highlights again.

As I wanted it more orange, I'll add colors always as the same way (strokes + smudging)



step 13

I'll also do the hair line




step 14

I'll finish cleaning all the parts inside, where the face should be, and some minor details.




step 15

Here you are !

This is not a make a real skin like tutorial so don't be hard on me for the face.

If you don't like drawing comics hairs, we'll see how to put that technique in action with a picture for our lovely PST Contests