Hello! In this article I will teach you step by step How to paint ANIME style hair in Clip Studio PAINT, but previously we will quickly analyze how to draw hair.

basic hair shape

If you are starting to learn about hair, I recommend that you do the following exercise, to understand hair from its structure to the final drawing.

 

1. Make a guide line that indicates the direction that the hair will have.

2. Draw the volume that the hair will have, but in a very basic way. (Geometric figure)

3. Now apply all the necessary details to draw the hair.

Process for drawing hair

Now understanding in a simple way how to draw the hair, we can move on to drawing the full hair, for this I share the following example.

And to understand it better, you can see the process in this GIF:

As you can see, we start by drawing the general shape of the hair in a very basic way and after that, we add the details and the finer hairs, to make it more realistic.

Different hair on the same face

The next image is amazing! You can see how we can draw different types of hair on the same face and the girl changes completely, so you realize how important hair is in our characters.

 

 

The Illustration that we will make:

Once we have learned in general terms how to draw the hair, we can go on to paint it, then I will show you the process from the sketch, the line and the base color.

Taking this as a starting point, we are going to learn how to paint anime-style hair with advanced techniques but explained in a very simple way, all of that, in the following Clip Studio PAINT tutorial:

VIDEO: HOW TO PAINT ANIME style hair in Clip Studio PAINT

Remember to activate the subtitles in your language, you will surely find it :)

What do you think about the video? We saw step by step how to paint the hair from the beginning, achieving a truly incredible result, as you can see again in the following image:

ANIME style hair color process

Now I invite you to see the step by step so that you understand it even better.

1. Color Palette and Light Reference

We start with the illustration creating layers that will be very useful to us, one of them is the color palette, with different shades for the hair and the drawing of the sun, which tells us where the light comes from.

2. First Shade of Hair

We create a new rasterized layer and its name will be: Shadow Hair 1, and here we choose the third color from the palette and start painting, helping us with the "Adjust to lower layer" tool, so that everything we paint is only on the base hair color

 

I love this tool :)

It is also important to add realism to the shadow, for example we can paint with the pen tool making the shadow more similar to the shape of the hair.

 

Here we can add and remove color, remember that with the C key we can exchange between the color and the transparent color.

3. Dark color on the shadow

Now selected the Hair Shadow 1 layer we are going to Activate the transparent pixels, in order to add a darker tone to the shadow of the hair, here both the brush and the airbrush can work very well.

4. Hair highlights

Now with the dropper tool we choose the first color of the palette and we are going to make the shine in 2 areas of the hair, in the upper part and in the lower part, following the shape of the hair.

 

To do this, do not forget to create a new layer called: Brightness.

This time we use brushes to make the glitter faster, which I share below:

5. Hair shine details

As I mention in the video, I always recommend adding or removing color to the brush that we have applied, so that it does not look like it is an automatically used brush:

6. Hair Shade 2

We create a new layer called Hair Shadow 2 and applying a dark color from the palette we obtain the following result:

7. Shadow with Blending Mode

We create a new layer and in it we are going to use the blending mode: Multiplication. We'll use the same shade as before, the darker color, only this time it will look even darker since we have the Multiply blending mode applied.

8. Fine hair

Now we will create a new raster layer above the drawing line to add very fine hairs, this will help our illustration look more realistic. We choose the base color of the hair with the eyedropper tool and create the hairs with the pen tool.

Once we have created them, we block the transparent pixels of this layer and with the darkest color we are going to apply shadow, either with the brush tool or the airbrush.

9. Light in the hair

Finally we create a new raster layer called "Light" above all the layers of the illustration

And in blending mode we choose Add (Brightness)

And by applying the lightest color of the palette with the airbrush we achieve the following effect.

10. Final Illustration (Comparison)

Now seeing how we started and how we finished we can realize how much we have learned and improved, the result is incredible.

I hope this article is very useful to you! Any comment is welcomed!

 

I wait for you in the next TIP!

PS: I leave you my Instagram where I share a lot of information ;)