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[Tutorial]Drawing semi-realistic hair
Recently I have gotten a lot of request about how to make hair, since my last human drawing tutorial tutorial found here Didn't have hair

Note that you might not want to do this tutorial if you are an absolute beginner in photoshop.

So here is what we are going to make


Un-mirrored: Mirrored:


OK lets start

Step 1: Make a skin tone background color so you can draw a face after you are done. You can choose to draw your hair on a different layer, but that isn't always necessary.


Step 2: paint the basic color that you want the hair to be in, this also helps you plan where you want the hair to go on the head. The arrows indicates where the hair split is and where the strokes of hair go. You have to draw every hair in the same direction to avoid them crossing over each other too much. because hair only go in one direction unless you have really curly hair xD look at a human head for examples.


Step 3: So lets start drawing hair, Make it a little darker than the base color and a little tick, this is just some small strokes to make the background color vary. This also make some parts of the hair appear darker than the others.


Step 4: Make it lighter than the base color this time, this assembles the lighter colors of hair.


Step 5: Now you switch back to a darker color to make it more detailed. And after that you switch to a lighter color, Every time you decrease size to make it more and more rendered and detailed. This brings us several brightnesses to our hair and makes it look more like normal hair.


Step 6: You get the point. Make sure you override the base color(step 1), because you don't want your hair to be linear do you?


Step 7:


Step 8:


Step 9:


Step 10: Ok so we have done this enough now. Now we want to burn and dodge to assemble the highlights in the hair where the light hits your hair. Here is where the light will hit your hair. Green areas symbolizes dark spots and red symbolizes light spots where the light hits. Make sure the hair split stays dark, because there is no flat hair that reflects light there. The area around the split on another hand have a lot of hair that will reflect light.


Step 11: Split the head in middle and flip it so you can fix the backside. The back of the tori does in most cases get a split if you don't do this, since the texture is not mirrored.


If you want extra details read on.

Step 12: In filter/render/lighting effects you see a handy option, experiment with this and you may better the outcome.

After you have done this you may want to flip again and fix the back of the head.

If you want a little extra details you can go and draw light and dark strokes with 1pixel brush.

And remember, this is only a way of doing it, if you are aiming for another outcome you should probably use Google and find another tutorial. Still this is the only tutorial that is made to fit into a spear

Any questions about this or any of my other tutorials? pm me. Don't forget to check out my human drawing tutorial.

Note:
If you are going to post in this thread post constructively and read the rules.
Last edited by Ezeth; Jun 3, 2010 at 10:13 PM.
is it supposed to have photobucket thing?, you shoudl fix the photos because not everyone can see them

tutorials are for everyone i guess
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