Drawing hair

Ouch, that took a while. I could go on to make all sorts of excuses for not updating, but I doubt anyone's interested, so let me just promise at least one update a week from now on, with an extra one this week in trade for no updates the past few weeks. On to the actual content!

People seem to love to draw hair, and really, I can’t blame them. Hair is, how else can I say it, pretty. In a drawing, it can really make or break a character, so it’s important to be able to decently depict it. Apart from that, though, it can also be an incredibly fun and rewarding thing to draw!

Therefore I thought it’d be a good idea to tackle the problems I see most often when people attempt to draw hair. There’s two things that you must at all times remember:

• Hair grows on your head.
  Yes, that sounds really stupid, but more than once have I seen it happen that underneath the hair, there’s just no room for a skull, or the hair is way and way too big for just one head. Here’s two extremes:

Doesn't look too bad, right? How about we try to draw where the heads are?

Wow! Can you see what I mean? The left one's head is way too small, while the right one has way too much hair! No one has hair that big!

• Hair flows.
  Hair isn’t sticks, it’s not straw, but it isn’t anything like wool either. Hair has its own texture, and there’s not really anything like it, which is why it’s so hard to make artificial hair (wigs) look so natural. It’ll take time and study to master its texture, but the basics are fairly easily: make it flow.

The most important thing about drawing hair is making it fall naturally. So let’s start with a warm-up practice: draw wavy lines. That is all. It doesn’t need to be hair, but it does have to flow. Make the lines curl a bit more or a bit less, make them go in a different direction, do whatever you want, but make it flow. Fill up one page, and don’t spend too long on it, no more than one minute preferably. Here’s what I made:

Now that we’re warmed up, let’s try drawing actual hair. I’m going to go with a fairly cartoony style for now, simply because it takes way less time to draw, and practising the shape of the hair in general is, for now, more important than the lighting and texture.

Now, start by drawing a head, and if you are so inclined, add a pair of shoulders, as they can influence how the hair falls. From there, add whatever haircut you feel like giving your floating head. Here’s a few tips:

• Hair has weight. Unless the hair is styled with hairspray, teasing or through other methods, it’ll fall fairly flat on the head. At the crown or parting of the hair, you can see a tiny bit of skin. You don’t have to draw this, but remember that the outlines of the hair have to “touch” the outlines of the head here. Next to this, the hair will fall over other hairs, so it’ll be slightly bumped up, but gravity pulls hair down, which works against the unnatural volume of hair you often see in anime. The bottom of the hair will always have more room to flow, and will almost always be wider than the top.Another effect gravity has on hair is that it pulls curls into straight hair. When someone has long, curly hair, the bottom of the hair is curlier than the top. This is because the top has to carry the weight of the rest of the hair, which pulls it down.The only kind of hair that hardly seems affected by gravity is afro hair. Once it gets really long, you can notice that it starts hanging down, but for the most part, you can almost completely forget about gravity with this haircut!
• Hair sticks together. You know how sticky hair gets when it’s static? It does that all the time, but to a lesser extent. Hair sticks to itself, and therefore naturally falls into strands, which can be very handy for us. I we draw not every single hair, but just the strands it falls into, the eye recognizes it as hair fairly easily. Especially for the cartoony style I’m using for now: do not draw too many lines! With just a few lines, mostly the outlines and hair that falls differently from the rest (such as the parting, bangs, or hair that’s tucked behind the ears), you can draw a naturally looking haircut.
• Curls can be difficult to draw, because of their unpredictability. If you have trouble drawing curls, stick with straight or wavy hair for now.

Here’s a few I did:

When starting on realistic hair, you’re in for a challenge. Just because of the sheer amount of detail that’s in it, it’ll take you a lot of time. It’s not very predictable either, which means you’ll have to study how real hair actually works. Always look up references. If you’re drawing from imagination, look up hair that’s similar to that of your character, and study. I’ll say it again, study study study, because there’s no replacement for the understanding of hair you’ll get from studying it.

If you want to achieve realism, you’ll have to draw a fair number of hairs. You don’t have to draw every single one, because our eyes just can’t tell the difference between a hundred and a thousand lines on a surface that small. You also risk losing the contrast in your drawing. If you keep going over and over the same surface again, it’ll start looking like a block, a solid surface, because there won’t be any contrast between the hairs that are on top (which catch more light) and underneath.

If you want to draw soft hair, you’ll have to use a lot of gradation between the darker and lighter parts of the hair. For coarse hair you should try to stick to harder lines, and less values in between the highlighted and shadow area. When drawing in pencil, use a harder pencil for coarse or “sharp” looking hair, when working digitally, try to use more contrast between the colours, and make it a lot less smooth than you would do with other surfaces.

Finally, when drawing hair, never move your pencil up and down! Start at the root, and always lift the pencil after you’ve finished drawing one hair. This is an easy way to cheat the tapered ends that hair has. If you move your pencil up and down, the ends of the hair will start looking unnatural or just dead, because they’re so blunt. You’ll also have more trouble making the hair flow, because a flowing movement is usually easier to achieve with wrist movements, which are hard to do exactly the same in both directions.