Hello everyone! Welcome to this tutorial.

Welcome to this tutorial where you will learn how to draw and paint hair, I will also show you how to draw different types of hair, using basic tools in Clip Studio, as well as the use of light and shadow to give a better finish to the drawing, the use of textures and brushes, at the end I will show you a Tip to draw hair easier and faster.

1.) Introduction: head shape and hair

To understand how to draw hair, we must first see what the shape of the head is like.

 

• The head can be simplified as a sphere, which, descending behind the skull, forms a curvature and joins with the neck.

 

• The center of the skull is where the hair grows.

The hair can be born from the division in the middle of the head or from a point in the middle of the head, the latter is more recurrent in anime or manga style hairstyles, it is also the part with the greatest amount of hair on the head.

The hair has to follow the curvature of the head, the round shape must be respected so that it looks much more natural and coherent.

 

• We can divide the head into parts to observe how it interacts with the hair.

 

-Remember that hair does not grow behind the ear but in front we have the sideburns

 

In hair, it will mostly come from the green part, while the yellow part is the fringe that goes in front, but it depends on the type of hairstyle you want to create, the blue part is the sideburns.

Depending on the movement of the head, the hair can be divided into more or less parts.

 

• It is important to understand that depending on the movement of the head the hair will take shape, to show much more dynamism in our drawing it is important to understand how the movement influences the hair.

In the first example, the movement is marked by the tilt of the head and the simulation of a breeze coming from the left side, causing the hair to move to the right and in a quite marked way.

 

In the second example, what marks the movement is the tilt of the head, for this reason it has much less movement than in the first image.

 

• Different things influence the movement of the hair, such as the wind, the tilt of the head or gravity.

2.) Hair Types

• When drawing hair or anything else we can give linear value to the drawings, this means that the line or strand starts thicker and then ends up thinner.

 

 

There are many types of hair and different ways to draw it, what I always recommend to start drawing hair is to observe, always try to simplify to basic shapes, that will help you to be able to draw any type of hair.

 

• For example we can start from basic shapes such as a rectangle to make straight hair

Simplifying the shapes helps us a lot when drawing hair, just as we use a rectangle for straight hair, we can use other shapes to make different types of hair.

 

• For curly hair we have several shapes such as waves or small rectangles to make curls.

Same theory for hairstyles, always try to start from the simplest to the most detailed.

 

-For example, for a hairstyle with braids we can start from the shape of a Y to guide us or if we want to draw some bows, the figure can be a semi sphere.

These are some examples, however there are many types of hair and hairstyles, this is just a way to simplify some of them, if you do not know how to draw a type of hair you can always look for references

3.) Now yes! How to draw hair.

Now that we know how hair works and the different types of hair, it is time to put it into practice.

 

• I always start by drawing the basic shape of how I want my character's hair to be, in a simple way and without details with the G pen tool.

Once we have marked the base shape we can start to put the main color, for the base color we can put a color a little closer to gray, we can also fill it with the paint pot, or paint it by hand.

-To give it more depth we can take the base color and increase the saturation and lower the lighting, to mark the strands of hair a little.

 

-Same for the brightness we can start from the base color, increase the saturation and increase the light of the color.

Once we have the base color defined, we can add the brightness and the darker strands, we can left clip on the tab and a list of options will open, we choose >> level correction>>

 

• To draw or mark the strands of hair I use the round mixer brush.

• We can play with the values until we are satisfied with the finish

4.) Light and shadow in the hair

Light and shadow can give a different finish to our hair.

 

• For this we must see where the light comes from, to know where the shadow will be positioned in our drawing.

 

For this process I use the airbrush tool with noise to give the drawing texture, in a new layer we choose the brightness option and adjust it to the lower layer, so that it affects only the hair and does not leave the drawing.

In the first example the light comes from the left side and behind the person, while in the second the light is in front of the person and is much softer.

 

• Due to the light, many times our drawing can make the skin and hair tone look lighter, if they do not want this to happen, they can play with the amount of light they put on and make the hair in a separate layer from the skin to keep the skin tone as in the beginning, in my case I did everything in the same layer and for that reason the skin tone changes

 

• For the shadows I repeat the same process but this time put the layer on multiply and with the airbrush I mark the shadows.

5.) Raster Cover

The Raster layer can help us put the finishing touches on our hair so that it looks much more dynamic and natural.

 

-For this we give a left clip on the layer and choose >>new raster layer>>

Once in the raster layer, with the same round mixer brush we start to draw out strands in the hair, respecting the colors of light and shadow for a more brilliant and beautiful finish.

Tip to draw hair quickly!

Now that we know how to draw and paint hair in a traditional way, I'm going to show you what tools and functions in Clip Studio help me save time and make many types of hair like the ones in these examples.

To get fast and beautiful hair we have to do:

 

1.) Once we have the head of our character, we will take whatever brush we use for the lineart and choose the color white.

2.) In a new layer we go to >> layer properties>> effect >> border effect>> black color.

Which will give us this effect on the brush.

 

It's very pretty and it helps me a lot to draw hair easily, plus when doing the lineart it looks clean.

 

• It can be done with any brush but I recommend using the G pen

To be able to paint on it, what we will do is:

a) left clip on the layer and choose rasterize.

b) then we go to >>edit>> convert luminosity to opacity>>

 

That way we can calmly paint over the drawing

If you find it very difficult, remember that Clip Studio Assets has many brushes that you can try and if none convinces you, you can always search for >>hair>> in the Assets bar and you will find many brushes that will make it easier for you to draw hair.

 

This concludes this tutorial, you can go to YouTube to find the video where I explain this again and make more examples of how to draw hair, you can also follow me on Twitter, Instagram or Tiktok, the links are on my Clip Studio profile.

 

Thank you so much!