How to Draw Hair
Monday May 5, 2008
One of the biggest problems I see with beginner portrait drawings is problem hair. Usually, we try to draw each hair as a strand, with a single pencil-stroke. This looks wiry and unnatural. The trick with drawing hair is to focus on drawing the areas of light and shade, looking for the shadows on sections of hair or under the hair. Correctly drawn hair makes a huge difference to a drawing, so its worth spending some time on it. This tutorial shows you How to Draw Short and Long Hair.
Comments
Helen,
Can you address how Leonardo conceived and drew hair?
–Stan
Hmm, interesting, Stan. Now that’s a bit of a challenge. I’ve been thinking about it for a day or two – I’ll have to see if I can track down some suitable examples that I can get permission to reproduce.
Have you any thought on his approach?
verryinteresting how shadows are all you draw to make hair look real what about highlights is that blended to or left alone and just blend and shade dark areas.
Great tutorial! Hair is a difficult feature and takes a while to learn. I too started out drawing every strand. I still sometimes have trouble with hair, especially black hair. That would be a tutorial that I would request. Black hair seems to be most difficult for me because I always want to put more value into the hair than is really there.
Anyway, great tutorial, and very accurate.