Hello friends! How's it going?

I am Gaia and today, just like every new moon, I'm here with a new blog to help you draw and color the hair you've always wanted!!

 

As I always tell you, there are no rules in art, and rather than giving you a definitive formula, I'm here to give you several tips that have helped me on my artistic journey. Without further ado, I am Gaia and welcome to this blog!! (Or video)

The basics

The first thing we have to understand is where hair comes from. Well, your hair grows from something called a “follicle” and you have many, okay? Too many, but one of the parts of the body where you have the highest concentration of them is here.

In this shaded area you see, which is called the “scalp.” On your skull, there are more areas where hair grows, like a beard, but for now, we'll leave that for another time.

The scalp has this “M” shape on the forehead; like everything else, it can vary depending on who you are drawing, BUT on average, one of your eyes should fit there. Although many things can make this change. For example: the size of the forehead, or how bald your character is, among many other things.

It's important to highlight the entire area covered by the scalp because a common mistake we tend to make when we start drawing (or at least it happened to me) is forgetting the hair surrounding the ears or the famous sideburns that your mom used to pull.

Now, it's important to mention that we all have a “hair direction.” Which commonly starts from the center line of the hair and goes “falling” towards the sides.

This is a very simplified way of looking at it, and I'm very sure that if you search a bit on the internet, you'll find hair growth maps much more detailed than this one, but for now, this will be enough for us. Remember it because it's going to be very important later.

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Alright, we already know where hair grows, that's cool, that's great, now what?

Well, now we can take care of starting to build the personality of the hair in question, and for that, we're going to bring back one of the channel's favorite words << The silhouette >>

In visual communication and character construction, hair is one of the most important parts when it comes to reflecting your character's personality. For narrative purposes, a simple hairstyle will essentially say the same thing as a flashy and complicated hairstyle; at the end of the day, it's a support for your character's personality.

The Silhouette

When building the silhouette, we have to bring in our old friends: geometric shapes.

And deciding in what shape we are going to represent our hairstyle is “I would say” the first fundamental step of all this. Let's take the example of an Afro.

Even though all 3 are essentially the same hairstyle, each one is communicating different things. Generally, square shapes tend to represent rigidity and discipline. Triangular figures are more associated with dynamism and energy—you can take that as aggressiveness or a lot of emotion, or the emotion you find on the ruler gauge that's in the red or yellow—and circular shapes are usually calmer and friendlier to the eye.

Basically.

Now, don't be afraid of the silhouette, respect it, because the silhouette can be a double-edged sword. Precisely because the hair's silhouette is so powerful, it can conflict with other elements you want to stand out on the head. For example:

Glasses

Horns

Noses, etc.

At the end of the day, hair is just another tool you have in your character design.

Personally, I recommend that if you want your character to have a standout feature that isn't their hair, then don't overcomplicate it; make a simple silhouette.

Saying you have to make a silhouette is very simple, but how is it done?

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This is where I say it's all a matter of practice and that you'll gradually get the hang of it, but you want an answer now, so I'm going to give you a bit of inspiration so you can start exploring what type of silhouette works for you and what doesn't.

You can use fruits, geometric shapes, or angles and scribbles! Again, the silhouette might seem complicated, but you're not reinventing the wheel; you're finding your character's personality. Remember to have fun doing it!

I know we spent a long time on the silhouette, but really, I think it's the most important part of the entire hair-making process; the rest is rendering and a bit of technique that can be learned very easily. But the silhouette is one of those not-so-obvious things that many advanced artists already master without knowing they do, and for that reason, it's one of the tips I've seen most forgotten when explaining how to draw hair.

The Shape

Not all hair is created equal, and as we already know, there is a lot of variety.

For practical reasons, we'll forget the technical names of all these hair types that you probably already know and simply put it on a scale from 1 to 4 depending on how curly or kinky (or however you say it) the hair you want to draw is.

Basically, to change the way we draw each hair type, we're going to change the amount and the type of angles in a single lock of hair. Hair types

that are very straight tend to have a fluid and uninterrupted movement, while a very curly lock of hair will have a greater number of angles, and as the hair becomes curlier, the angles will become increasingly sharp.

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Now, knowing how to draw these locks independently serves many purposes.

If you're doing a very fluid hair movement, then this is where the locks will save our lives. Instead of making an amorphous mass of hair, we're going to do the following: First, we have to define the silhouette we want for our hair.

Then, we're going to start fragmenting our hair into different “locks,” remembering that all of these originate from the hairline (I told you it would be important).

When we separate this fluid movement into different parts, it's much easier to shape it. Now, we're going to give each of these locks a different outline.

Very important: we don't want to outline the complete contour of the lock!

We want to integrate everything so it looks like part of the same mass.

Doing this will not only make it easier for you to create those amazing silhouettes you want to achieve, but it will also make it easier for you to render it.

Rendering

Hair rendering is one of the best exercises you can do to practice texturing in your illustrations. As in many other areas of drawing, there is no single right answer; what I'm going to tell you next is the technique I've used in my illustrations and that has worked for me. You are free to use this same technique and modify it as your drawing style requires!

For this, we're going to go back to the locks, because as we've already seen, hair is simply many locks joined together; if you know how to render one, you know how to render them all.

Remember that at the end of the day, 2D illustration is nothing more than a way to represent our 3D world, and to represent our 3D world, we have to think in volumes. And I know you don't see any volume in this... so let's use this instead!

Understanding how to render a lock of hair has the same principle as understanding how to render a valley and a mountain.

For both, we will have to understand the relief.

Obviously, the top of the mountain is higher, so it's easier for light to reach the highest part of the mountain than the lowest part of the valley.

We're going to use the same concept here.

We're going to decide which is our mountain and which is our valley.

For this, we're going to use lights and shadows.

Now, do you know how many hairs can be in a single lock of hair? ... That's right, more than 2, and that's a lot. We're not going to stop to color each individual hair independently, so we're going to use a texturing process.

Basically, this is not a regular surface, so light won't reach every single space in the same way. Therefore, we're going to “invade” the lights with the base color, and the base color with the shadows. In this way, the borders that were very clear at first stop being so, always keeping in mind the shape we want to give to our shine.

You can apply this same thing with a more complicated hair shape.