How To Draw Hair (Patreon)

Hello wonderful creatives!

This month I had a request to explain how to draw hair, and I’m excited to share what I know with you because it’s one of my favourite things about drawing a character. Hair can bring so much depth, colour and movement to an illustration so hopefully these tips help you understand hair a bit better and level up your character drawing!

So, let’s get started!

Shape

First, let’s talk about shape. Although it’s tempting to just draw hair as one blocky shape, most of us have hair that is dynamic and flowing, especially if you have lots of flyaways like I do.

So rather than having hair that sticks to the shape of the head or falls straight down, bring in some movement or wind to make your character’s silhouette more interesting.

Some things that I do to make a more interesting hair shape:

Introduce some gaps and cutouts where hair is separated and break up the shape

Consider whether hair is behind the ears or in front of the ears (I often like to do one of each for long hair)

Introduce some individual strands that got away

Bring in some movement so that the hair doesn’t go straight down (even straight hair)

Consider whether all the hair is in front of or behind the character, or a bit of both

You can see in this example of straight, mid-length hair that we’ve taken it from being a plain and very blocky silhouette, to having an interesting and dynamic shape.

Here are some examples of a few ways you could draw different hair lengths in an interesting shape:

Direction

Now let’s consider direction. Hair is made up of lots of individual strands and we can make hair look more interesting by showing (or implying) their direction. For my style, I like to draw a few darker strands of hair and then imply the rest with shading, but you might like to draw in lots of strands if you prefer more detail - it’s up to you!

When you’re drawing in your strands, you could follow the shape of the hair you’ve drawn if you like, or you can make a wraparound effect by taking your strands over the edge of your shape to imply they wrap back to where we can’t see them. I think this is particularly effective with wavy hair, I’ve given an example below. When I draw hair for my characters I usually do a bit of both!

Colour

You can of course have hair any colour you like, it doesn't have to be natural, but to get you started I've put together a few common hair colours in this palette:

The Process

So let’s draw some wavy hair in steps, start to finish. I’ll number the steps and show examples for those numbers so you can see what I mean.

1. First I’ll draw the shape of our hair (using the tips we just talked about) in one colour. I’ve gone for this light brown.

2. Next, I’ll add a few strands in a darker brown where I want to show the main direction of the hair. I try not to go overboard (but sometimes I do).

3. In a slightly lighter colour than the one we just used, and using thinner strokes, I’ll draw in a few more detail strands to show the direction some more. I focus the shorter details on the ends and edges, and also on some of the curves.

4. Now I’ll take a broad texture brush and add a general pass of texture to the hair in a darker brown. It’s subtle and broad, but I’ll focus around the back of the neck and toward the edges.

5. I’ll then build on that with another layer of darker texture, this time a bit more refined and focused on the direction of the hair and behind the neck.

6. Then I’ll do another layer of texture even finer again, just to really give depth to the areas I want to be darkest. I mostly try and follow the detail lines of strands that I drew earlier.

7. Lastly, I’ll take a much lighter brown and draw in some soft highlights. I’ll focus on the top of the hair and the outer edges of curves where I think the light would catch.

And that’s it!

When I draw my character illustrations I’ll often draw more layers of texture and highlight, and often end up with a dozen or so texture layers because I pretty much always get carried away with it. 

So that’s a quick summary of my process for drawing hair and a few tips for you, I hope it was helpful and if you have any questions let me know!❤