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| HOW TO DRAW HAIR |
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I didn't think my first drawing lesson would be on hair, but ah well, I guess I was just in the
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If you're having trouble drawing hair, it might be because you want to just jump directly into it
and draw the person's head of hair as one object, which you shouldn't do at ALL. Hair is a 3D
object just like everything else on the human body, only it's more closely related to cloth than
anything else. Like cloth, it has free form, which means it's going to move when acted upon by
other forces. Gravity pulls hair down, but if the wind is blowing, hair blows in the direction of
the wind. Look at the picture to the left. Believe it or not, everyone's hair grows from the line
indicated on the guy's head. By that, I don't mean you have it styled that way, I mean that your
hairline begins where that line is.
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Look at this 3/4 view of the head. As you can see, your hairline starts at the top of your ear and
curves up towards the top of the head, then curves again and goes straight to the other side and
does the same as the other side. You also have the sideburns coming down from the sides of your
ears.
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Here's a slightly overhead view from the back. The hairline starts by the ear, curves over the ear
and angles down to the base of the skull, not the neck. No matter how long your hair is, the roots
start from there.
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Ok, now that you know where the hair should start from, it"s time that you learn in what direction
the hair should grow and move in. I know that your different characters are going to have different
hair styles, but for now just follow this and you can start to learn how to manipulate the lines
into looking like the hair style you want.
First, you need to know how thick the hair is. Usually near the top
and front of your head the hair is generally thin. The sides of your
head are usually have the thinnest layer of hair, and the crown of your
head has the thickest hair on it. If you look at the picture, you'll see a blue line representing the scalp and a red line representing the surface of the hair. The distance between the two lines shows how thick the hair is in different areas of the head.
One important thing to remember when placing the lines to indicate
the direction the hair is growing is the part. If you part your hair,
then it is a major change in the motion of the hair. Draw your lines
always moving away from the part. If the hair is thick near the part,
you should curve the lines a bit to simulate a hump. Always remember
though, the hair is always growing out and down, and most people only
style the front of there hair, so as you move towards the back of the
character"s head, the lines should be going straight down.
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Here is a picture I did of hair with a part on the left side of the head. The hair is combed up and
over so that a locke of hair falls onto the forehead. Remember that no matter how you style your
hair, the hair line is still there, so if it's there, draw it! Always draw your hairline first and
style the hair around the hair line. If the line is still visible when you've finished, make sure
to draw lines indicating the direction in which the hair is moving. I've added many lines by the
one in the picture to indicate that it's underneath the top layer of hair.
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After you've made your hair style, you need to flesh out the hair by adding lines to it. Depending
on the color of the hair, you'll add more or less lines (if blonde, less, if brown or black, more).
Look at the first picture. The light is coming from above, so naturally anything lowest on the
picture would be darker, so near the neck and base of the head, you'll have to add more lines.
Remember that folds of the hair need to be darker because more hair has gathered there. The way I
do sideburns is to not draw an outline of the sideburn (if it's not thick) and just draw the
individual hairs that make up the sideburns. Again, keep the original hairline there if it's
visible, and make it a little darker than the rest if hair is overlapping it.
Now look at the second picture below. This shows the head from the
back again, only with detail this time. Again, the lowest part of the
hair should be darker than the rest, and anything near the light source
should be lighter and have less lines than the rest of the head. Also
notice the part in the hair, the lines move away from the part. Don't
forget that. Then finally, there's the crown of the head. This area is
hard to do, and eveyrone has different crowns, so if you don't feel
comforatble with doing it, just leave it out. If you are gonna do it,
just remember that a crown is just like a part, and the lines should
move away from it.
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Now click on NEXT to learn how to do longer hair and shaved hair.
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