Hi and welcome to this tip, I’m Ricky and today’s subject is HAIR! I’ll try to keep it practical and direct, so grab your tools and let’s draw together!!

When I think about hair, the keyword is always FLOW. And I like to do it with these 3 steps: Curved Lines, Guides and Biggest Shape to the Small ones.

Starting with Guides. They can be indications of possible directions and they help you visualize the final shape. Try to utilize Curved Lines, even if you’re doing a spikey hair. The initial shape resembles “C” and “S”. As time goes by you’ll be able to fuse different shapes and distort them, but let’s stick with these two for now!

Oh, by the way, you can download this hair chart and use it to practice. It can be printed too. You also can use it as a base for making your own characters!

As you can see, by placing these indications on the drawing, we start to see some shapes that can suggest places where you can build chunks of hair. You don’t need to fill every single spot, white spaces can be resting places for the eye.

By starting with larger shapes, we can get a quick look on the overall shape and format of our drawing. Later we add more details, making a very natural transition between a clean drawing to a more detailed one.

A “full attack”, starting with too many small shapes can result in a complex drawing on early stages. It’s going to be way more complicated to make late rearrangements, so I do prefer to add them after the big shape is in place. Here other examples.

Some final touches, like small breaks, can add variety to the flow of your hair design. I try to not overdue it, but it helps a lot! If you fill white spaces with ink or lines, you'll add depth to the hair. a similar approach can be made with gray tones.

And every hairstyle here relies on the “C” and “S” shapes that we mention in the beginning. So, by following these steps, you’ll be able to draw every hairstyle that you want. Remember to look at photos and references to increase your repertoire. But the most important thing is draw! If you have no idea of what to do, try copy something. Try to fill the hair chart file with different hairstyles.

Thank you for reading, I really hope this tutorial can help you and keep drawing. If you need time to relax and rest, do it. It is part of the learning process too. But don’t give up. As you practice, you’ll get better at your own pace.

Keep drawing.

 

Extra content:

Here’s a video that I recorded as complementary information for this tip, have a nice day and once again, thank you. I hope we all can improve together.