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Drawing hair can be one of the most enjoyable yet challenging parts of creating characters.
Rather than focusing on a specific style, this guide shares lesser-known yet highly effective practical tips and Clip Studio Paint features to help you draw hair more easily and confidently—no matter your style or technique. They can be applied to anything from realistic to highly stylized hair! (The examples used are mostly semi-cartoon, but that’s just because I find drawing stylized hair more challenging and fun than realistic 🦄)
These tricks will help you shape natural-looking hair, add depth, and bring your characters to life!
🟧 Reflect Personality Through Hairstyle and Color
Look at how changing just the hair (and matching the eye and outfit color) completely transforms a character’s vibe. The right hairstyle helps express personality and makes characters more recognizable, especially in comics or webtoons.
For example, characters with straight hair in darker or natural colors often come across as calm and mature:
Spiky or messy bright hair suggests an impulsive and energetic personality:
Wavy hair in soft pastel tones gives off a romantic or innocent feeling:
A short or tied-up hairstyle on female characters can make them look active and sporty…
… While long, loose hair often gives an elegant vibe:
A visible hairline gives a character a more mature or strict appearance:
(Also, be careful when changing a character’s hairstyle throughout a comic - a hairstyle is such a typical identifying trait they may not even recognize themselves :D )
Fringes, especially fluffy ones, look cute, but make sure the eyes and eyebrows are clearly visible, or else the character’s expressions will be hard to read:
👉 You can solve this by placing the hair strands between and to the sides of the eyes, and drawing eye details over the fringe if needed:
🟧 Use Guides to Build the Hairstyle
Not sure where to start? Drawing the following simple guides can help you establish a balanced hairstyle:
🟨 Head shape
Sketch the head and neck—and shoulders if the hair goes that far. This gives you a clear base to build from.
💡 Quick tip: 3D head models 💡
If head proportions are tricky, try using Clip Studio Paint’s 3D head models. You can adjust the model and use it as a reference to make drawing the head and face easier:
🟨 Front hair
Even for fluffy bangs, draw a hairline guide to avoid placing strand divisions too deep, which can make your character look bald:
The hairline typically has three “V” shapes: one at the top and two on the sides pointing roughly to the eyebrows:
You can also sketch a loose outline of the fringe’s outer edge to guide your drawing.
I usually draw the front hair first and adjust the back later to avoid overlap issues.
🟨 Back hair
Draw a minimum volume line, just outside the skull to avoid bald-looking areas:
Then add a maximum volume line farther out to set the shape of the full hairstyle:
ℹ️ Both of the volume guides’ shapes and distance depend on your preferences, style, and the hairstyle you’re going for.
The hair strands should stay between these two volume lines—the longest tips can reach the outer line, and the deepest valleys shouldn’t go inside the inner one:
In profile, adding more volume at the top and front gives a dynamic look:
🟧 Quick sketching tricks
🟨 Scribble the flow
If a style feels too complex, especially long or curly types, loosely scribble the flow and volume. The strands will naturally start forming from that:
🟨 Brushes
Try a thick flat brush with minimum size at the start and end to sketch layered hair strands. This works well for both short and long styles:
A brush tip with overlapping black and white ovals can even give a 3D shaded look:
🖌️ You can download these brushes in my assets and try them out :)
Curly hair can be done with various painting brushes.
Still stuck?
Explore Clip Studio Assets. You’ll find everything from outlined strands to short hair in a few strokes to fully shaded locks often used in manga and webtoons. These tools are the secret behind complex-looking hairstyles!
🎉🎉🎉 New bonus tutorial!
🆕 Due to the popularity of the special brushes part, I decided to make a short bonus tutorial where you can learn how to make your own cool 3D-like shaded brushes and complete outlined locks for your webtoon and illustrations, so make sure to check it out!
The brushes created there are also available for free in my Assets:
Here are some examples of other interesting hair brushes from other users that can be downloaded for free, so give them a try too:
Assets also offer 3D hair models that can help you understand a specific hairstyle’s structure, but they don’t capture the softness or motion that makes drawn hair feel alive.
🟧 The Secret to Natural-Looking Hair :D
🟨 Think in volume
Unless you aim for a very specific effect, avoid drawing individual hairs (great for horrors, though!). Group hairs into strands of varied thickness…
… Layering them for a natural, full look:
🟨 Flow
Hair grows outward from the scalp and bends downward with gravity. Long and soft hair bends more, while short or thick hair holds its shape better:
Draw the general direction of the flow first, then vary individual strands slightly to avoid stiffness:
🟨 Curved shapes
Soft, curved shapes like S and C curves give the hair a lighter, more natural appearance:
🟨 Vary strand thickness
Mix thick and thin strands for a dynamic, lively look:
Thick ones define shape, while thin ones add detail:
🟨 Natural hairline
⚠️ A straight hard edge where hair meets skin looks unnatural:
Use jagged lines or blend skin color into the hairline to soften it:
🟧 Handy correction tools
Flip the canvas occasionally to check balance and symmetry.
Try Mesh Transform, Liquify, Puppet Warp, or Vector Correction tools to fix proportions.
✌️ These tools make it easy to fine-tune volume or curves without redrawing!
🟧 Line Art Tips
For drawing lineart I use a completely basic brush - a simple round hard tip with pressure sensitivity adjusted to my needs.
🟨 Stabilization
Increase brush stabilization to make your lines smoother:
🟨 Vector layers and correction tools
Lineart on vector layers is very flexible:
🔸 Vector eraser - clean up lines of overlapping strands
🔸 Pinch tool - adjust and connect curves
🔸 Simplify tool - smooth lines
✌️ If you sketch on a vector layer, you don’t have to redraw for lineart—just clean up the sketch, adjust with correction tools, and draw additional details:
🟨 Thickness of lines
Try the Correct Line Width tool to adjust line thickness: thicken areas in shadow or where strands overlap, and thin lines hit by light to create depth:
🆕 As requested, here are the customized vector correction tools for download (contains explanation how to set them up with modifier keys for efficient workflow):
🟨 Alternative line art
You can create line art even without drawing the lines by using a brush with a border line (also in the brush pack for download) and/or drawing shapes with any brush or Lasso fill tool in white add layer border to it in the Layer property palette.
(One of the layers here is yellow for clearer explanation, but keep yours white and black for line extraction.)
To extract lines and turn the fill color transparent:
1️⃣ Put the layers inside a folder
2️⃣ Merge the folder to apply the layer border effect
3️⃣ Go to Edit > Convert brightness to opacity
You can even convert the raster lines into vectors:
4️⃣ Layer > Convert layer
5️⃣ Select Vector layer
6️⃣ The following settings worked for me:
Now you have vector lines that you can clean up and use line correction tools to refine it further!
🟧 Coloring Tricks
🟨 Quick fill
I use a customized Enclose and Fill tool (available in my Assets) with the lineart folder set as the reference. It fills complex shapes with minimal cleanup.
🟨 Colors
For natural hair, avoid overly saturated colors.
Darken the roots and lighten the tips for a sun-faded look:
For youthful or expressive characters, try color gradients to add personality:
🟨 Shading and rendering
Use the Lasso Fill tool to block in shadows. Don’t shade individual hairstrands but the hair as a whole:
Hair is naturally shiny, so parts facing away from light, especially near the top of the head, can be darker than you might expect.
Soften sharp transitions with a soft brush or blend them to create a smooth satin feel:
🖌️ The blending brushes can also be found in my Assets:
Brighten lower parts of the hair with reflected light:
Add thin light strokes along the lineart to puff up the volume:
Don’t be afraid to add extra light strands that don’t follow the original lineart—just erase part of the lineart if they overlap too obviously:
Short and messy hair is easier shaded with a backlight effect using a nudged selection of the hair layer as a shading mask.
💡 Liquify helps with shaping it.
You can add a few light strands to boost the volume.
💡 The examples here were shaded with my favorite “lighting” technique. It was presented in my Webtoon Coloring & Shading tutorial, if you want to give it a try:
🟨 Details
Only render detailed strands where they matter—around the face or focal points. Leaving the back less detailed keeps the focus clear and saves time.
🟨 Highlights
Use Add Glow, Glow Dodge, or Screen layers to add highlights.
You can paint them manually…
… Or use special highlight brushes from the Asset store. Adjust their shape with Liquify and erase parts to fit the style.
You can even experiment with adding sparkles in the hair!
⚠️ Avoid overdoing the contrast—too much can make the hair look wet:
⚠️ Also, placing highlights too high or low can flatten the strands:
I personally skip highlights. Instead, I use this method add shine to the hair:
1️⃣ Make a selection of the brightest part of the hair using the shading layer (Ctrl+click the shading layer icon and invert the selection; if using a lighting layer then without inversion)
2️⃣ Softly paint yellow over that area on a Glow Dodge layer.
(The selection is hidden for most of the gif, but active.)
🟨 Special effects
Use a soft brush on Glow Dodge, Overlay, and Soft light layers for color variations.
Red, purple, and orange add interesting effects in the foreground, while light blue on a Soft light layer helps blend the back part of the hair more into the background:
For even more variety, try drawing thin hard red lines on Overlay along the edges of the lights. It’s a very subtle effect but adds extra depth to the painting.
I add this effect in my comics though this process to save time:
1️⃣ Create a selection of the lighting layer (Ctrl+click the layer icon).
2️⃣ Expand it a few pixels (Selection > Expand selected area).
3️⃣ Fill it on a new Soft light layer with reddish or purplish color.
4️⃣ Create the lighting layer selection again.
5️⃣ Delete that area from the new layer.
6️⃣ Adjust opacity and erase where needed.
A set of selection expand and shrink auto actions that I use to speed up work:
🟨 Colored lineart
Add a new layer clipped to the lineart folder and color the outlines to give the hair a softer, more integrated feel:
🟨 Let light shine through!
For backlighting, clip a new Glow Dodge layer to the hair folder and softly paint inner parts of the hair with a light orange. This adds warmth and atmosphere, especially in sunset scenes.
🟧 Comic Stylization
🟨 Hairstyle as a 3D shape
Try simplifying complex hairstyles into basic 3D shapes when sketching. It helps maintain structure and consistency across panels.
🟨 “Cute” fringe
In profile, drawing the fringe arched like an umbrella over the nose can make the head appear rounder—and the character cuter—compared to what it would look like when going by the front view. What do you think? :)
🟧 Conclusion
Drawing hair doesn’t have to be a struggle. With a few tips and some help from Clip Studio Paint’s tools, you’ll be able to draw expressive, natural, and stylish hair with confidence and ease.
So keep practicing, have fun with it, and don’t be afraid to try new things!
Learn how to make your own cool 3D-like shaded brushes and outlined and shaded locks for webtoons and illustrations:
🌟⭐✨ If you enjoyed this tip, it will make me happy if you give a like so that I know I’m doing things right, eventually leave a comment on what you liked or didn’t and where I could improve. Suggestions for what I should cover in the future are also welcome! ✨⭐🌟
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