Whenever I am drawing a character, I often find myself planning an interesting hair do and getting excited about drawing the hair. I love the shading and highlighting, I love adding different techniques and I have been doing so for years.
So... this post is a bit about my "drawing hair" journey. I am of course continuing this journey right here on Steemit.
Note the images below have had the faces removed in order to help us focus on the hair.
Please feel free to comment on what you think on various styles and what is your favorite hair?
This image shows some of the basics of how to draw light hair and darker hair.
Also shows the highlight around the top of the head. Notice that this highlight is not on individual hairs, but across the hair at the same level.
This shows two levels of highlighting. Yes you can highlight each hair or hair section you draw, but you can also over-light an area that reflects the shine.
I hope that makes sense, will point that out through this tutorial.
Notice here that I have low-lighted wherever I wanted to create the curl, and then highlighted the higher point of each curl.
I did not use the individual hair thing here.
I used to just do blocks.
Notice that I have not even blended, other than shading with the pencil.
This still provides a cool effect.
Okay I have a look at the pencil drawing and an image with the darks really ramped up so that you can see what I did.
This is an effect to play with. I have used more pencil lines rather than chunks. I have also gone over the hairs doing "rendering" (using an eraser to create light hairs flying wild over top).
Now I could have mixed these effects and that is the fun of drawing hair - so let's continue to play using lowlighting and highlighting chunks of hair, and lowlighting and highlighting strands of hair.
I love the look of braiding and there are so many braiding forms and braiding hair dos to go for. Don't forget get out on the internet and research braiding styles. Pinterest is always great - have tons of braiding ideas.
So this was an experiment in dread locks - and I zoomed in on the top image and hyped up the lowlights on the bottom image.
This allows you to see how I played with the pencil work while drawing the hair.
Dreads are one of the most exciting things to draw, and I intend to do lots more in the future.
Take a chance and play with hair ideas. The great thing about Steemit is that we can post and help each other along the way. As I say I am still on a journey to continue to learn to draw. So join me for an adventure in drawing...
