Drawing Hair Using Blobs and Sheets

1. How to Draw Hair Intro: Hello, I'm Kia. This is a complete beginners tutorial on how to draw hair. This tutorial is designed for those who have absolutely no idea what they're doing or a new technique for those who are already well practiced. I'll show you a technique which won't just help you draw the realistic shape of hair, but also color it and make it look really cool. This technique is called blobs and cheats and can be applied to all hair types. I'll be using Photoshop on a Huon GT 220 V two display tablet, but this technique can be applied to any medium as well. I'll show you the basics of blobs and cheats, and then we'll go step by step to drawing basic shape to outline to more detail, and then to shadows and highlights. I'll then show you how to color for both cartoon and more realistic but still stylized hair. All while we practice on real life images. Your final project will be putting all the skills you've learned and making some really cool looking hair. So, let's get started. 2. Blobs and Sheets Basics: In this class, we are going to be learning about blobs and sheets. When you're drawing any object, you need to understand the shape of the object. The same goes with hair. Hair can be any shape, and that's what makes it so difficult to draw. However, the fundamentals of understanding the shape of the hair still apply. You can understand the hair in terms of blobs and sheets. Blobs are essentially the shape the hair takes when it's close to the scalp or at the roots. Sheets are the shape it takes at the ends of the hair. I'll show you the basics of blobs and sheets, and then we'll look at a portrait and draw only the shape that the hair in that portrait takes. Let's start with the blobs. Here you see I have two figures, one facing us and one to the side. This is important so you understand depths of the hair. Hairstyles change depending on how long it is. If it's long hair, you'll have a parting somewhere. If it's short hair, then you might not see the parting, but you'll still divide it up into blobs. If a partings on the top of the scalp, you'll probably only use two blobs, where the two blobs meet is where the parting is. You want your blob to curve around with your skull. You also don't want the top of the blob to go too high above the top of the head. There are a few exceptions. If your hair is very frizzy and thick, if your hairstyle has a lot of hair spray and it's very tall, or if you're trying to get a cartoony look. Most of the time for thin hair, it will look a bit off if the top of the blob is too high above the top of the head. That's when using blobs to draw hair can make the hair look worse rather than better. If the parting is in the middle, the two blobs would look a bit like this. If you have a fringe, you would have an extra blob in front, and since it's the ends of the hair, it would be a bit of a sheet. So the bottom is a straight line. It looks a bit weird now, but once you put in all the details, it'll look completely normal. The side of the head is a different story. This is where you don't want the blobs to be too thick. You don't want the blobs to go too much out from the hair at the top. Hair is just a bunch of string attached to your head. The shape of the hair is affected by gravity and therefore, the blobs will be pulled down. It also greatly depends on the thickness of your hair. It's not going to be much whider than the whidest points of your head. When it comes off your head is when simple blobs become rectangular sheets. It's still flat looking. Hair will curve off itself. It's fluid. It can get thicker and thinner. Edges will be straight, corners will be sharp, but it'll always be fluid like blobs. Like the scalp, it'll curve with the shoulders. It is being attracted down by gravity, but is shaped by the shoulders and the scalp and the hair's own shape. Shorter hair is essentially shorter, long hair. On the scalp, you're not really going to notice a parting. You're more likely to see one large blob at the top with two thin small ones at the side, the outer edges never going too far off the outer edges of the scalp. Try to find the simple shape in all hairstyles. We'll try that soon. Blobs don't have to be round. Let's give him a nice easy side fringe. At the top, which is closer to the scalp, it's round like a blob, but the bottom is pointy like a sheet because it's at the ends of the hair. It's all about understanding how the shape works. If it looks wrong to you, that means it is wrong. 3. Copying Models Part 1: We have a woman with medium long hair. We're going to draw over it to practice drawing hair. I'm using a digital tablet and Photoshop for this, but you can do this with a printed out picture. I'd recommend not using any of the photos I use, but to get your own so you can practice better. We're going to be following the shape of the hair. Here we have a parting, so that will be when the two blobs meet. Here I could continue on, but I'm going to overlap two blobs so we can understand its shape more. Think, if this were made out of clay, what shapes would I make? You can combine blobs to make an even bigger blob. Here's the beginning of another blob. Understanding hair shape means I can imagine what the hair might look like as it continues. As the hair ends and leaves the head, it turns to a sheet. Sheets can be just as fluid as blobs, but we'll have less rounded edges. On the left side is one blob, and without the picture, it looks very much like hair with blobs and shapes. It does look a bit weird, but as we continue on, I'll show you how to do the hair with much more detail. Now we're going to just copy the hair without actually drawing over it. It doesn't have to be the same as before, but we can try to recreate the shape. Here we have a traditional man's haircut, short and close to the scalp. The good thing about this hair is that it's messy. I'll show you the whole shape, but because the hair is methy, I can show you how to use smaller blobs to get more details. If his hair was completely neat, it would look like one large blob on the top of his head. Here his hair is hanging off his head. It'll be more of a sheet, but the shape is easy enough. Because his hair is methy, I can draw more of the detail in. Added bonus, this man has a beard. The hair is short here, so it doesn't matter if I use blobs and sheets. The practice of using blobs and sheets isn't set in stone. You can have fun with it. If we get rid of the picture, it will look like actual hair shape. Now, same as before, we're going to draw the shape of the hair without drawing onto the picture. This guy looks off to the side, so we're going to use this model. I start with the parting to get my bearings and exact same as before, sketch the basic shape of it, drawing close to the hair and not too high off it. I'll quickly draw the beard, but don't feel pressured to, as you'll need to know more about drawing faces to do so, which I'm sure I'll make a Skillshare video on in the future. There's a basic shape. You can always go back and rub out what doesn't look right. Don't worry if it doesn't look too neat or too detailed. This is all about understanding how to draw. There we go. It's a little messy, but his hair is a little messy, so that's okay. Just keep practicing with as many portraits as possible. You don't even have to use a photo. You can try to draw your friend's hair or your own by looking in the mirror. These templates are available to download if you are not up to drawing the head shape yourself. In the next video, we will go over more detailed hair like curly hair and different hairstyles to give you more practice with different shapes of hair. 4. Copying Models Part 2: We're going to go a little bit more into detail here. We now have a lady with very defined curl. It's the same principle as before. We're going to draw out the shape of her hair, circling all distinctive shapes into blobs. As we get to the ends of her hair, the curls hold their shape better than the straight hair would. So there are more blobs now than eps as they would be with straight hair in this position. But you can use whichever you think is more appropriate. When I remove the image, it looks like this. Now we're going to move on to frizzy hair. The curls are much smaller and there's a lot of them. It'll take you forever to draw every one of them, but if you really want to, go for it. Instead, I'm going to draw the main shape of the hair. Since the hair is so sick, it can be farther off the hair. The hair is still being pulled down by gravity, so the silhouette will still be a gentle gradient or else it might look like this, which is great if you're trying to draw a cartoon, but it doesn't look very realistic. If you want to get into more detail without drawing the individual srands, we might draw blobs of the curls at the top and then rub out the bottom. Or if you want to make life easier for yourself, you just draw a squiggly line. Let's hide the image. It looks strange, but this means we can improve it. We don't have to worry about the bottom just yet, as we'll learn more about it as we get into more detail later. Ponytails aren't really on the head, really, but they do make the hair that is on the scalp very close to the scalp. That's just a nice big circle right there. The ponytail is actually a blob that turns into a sheet or for simplicity's sake, just a blob. Sheets always hang down. Blobs aren't always affected by gravity. That's what it looks like without it. Plats are a bit more complicated, but as we've seen before, it's just more smaller blobs. Here it's a French plat, so it's part of the scalp. You'll find with plats, it's just blobs criss crossing itself. And it's a wide sheet here. As you practice, you'll end up developing your own technique. I'll give a quick demo on platting. You see the individual blobs interlocking on the sides, so we'll draw another plat with the same technique. And then we just turn them into blobs. Hair gets thinner as it goes down, so it would look something like this. Up close, you can just see it's a sideways blob pointing to the side of another blob, which is pointing to the side of another blob and so and so. That is a plat. For the fringe, it's on the scalp, but it hangs down, so it's a sheet on the forehead. The top is blobby, but the bottom is flat and the corners are sharp. Next, I'll show you these hairstyles on a model. First is curly hair. It looks weird, but I'll just outline it very quickly, and you can see it becomes lovely curls. For frizzy hair, it's like straight hair but much wider. That's only because of the thickness of the hair. To add more detail without drawing each curl, I'll just draw a squiggly line onto the sides. For the pony tail, the hair is tight and close to the scalp. If you do see a parting, it'll be around the sides or the top, but sometimes there is no parting. The tail part is just a blob that hangs down. Don't forget depths when you're doing this, or your image will look very flat. Now to turn her hair into a plat, we start with the outline. The hair gets thinner and there's a little bit at the end. Then our pattern, a perpendicular bob that points onto a perpendicular blob and so on. Quick fringe, just a sheet on the forehead. I recommend practicing these exercises as much as possible. This techniques with blobs and sheets isn't something you'll do when you get better at drawing, but will help you understand the dynamics of hair. In the next video, we'll be going through hair and motion and you'll learn how to draw hair when it's not at rest. 5. Hair in Motion: If the shape of sheets are determined by gravity, then all you need to understand about hair and motion is it's the exact same as drawing sheets, except this time gravity is not acting on them. You still need to be careful, though. There are two things you need to keep in mind when drawing hair in motion. The first is length. Before when sheets were determined by gravity, it was very easy to keep consistency in the length of hair as all the hair was going in the same direction. Hair will be going in all different directions when it is in motion. It will curve and this will make maintaining length of the hair difficult. All you have to keep in mind is that the length of the sheet, curving will always be the same as the length of the sheet at rest. That's why I recommend drawing the shapes of hair using a reference instead of trying to make it up from your imagination. Except this time, the hair you'll use as a reference is hair that is in motion. The second thing you need to understand is the amount of energy being put into the hair to make it defy gravity. Very rarely, unless the hair is in space or underwater, will the hair be above the head? Unless someone is running very fast or facing a very strong wind, will the hair be completely horizontal? Most likely, the person you are sketching will be walking. If the person has very short hair, you'll see almost no motion at all. If they have short hair but longer hair on the top of their head, their hair will be light and will require little energy to move it. Here it will only be the length of the sheet and the placement of the hair that will determine where it moves. For longer hair, it's heavier so you won't see it defying gravity often. Gravity still plays an important factor in hair and motion and so does direction. For instance, turning the head. You'll see that the hair is being pulled down, but there's still some motion to it, so it's being raised slightly off its resting position. It also shows the direction the hair is turning. However, you'll only see direction if the movement has enough energy to do so. The most common motion is walking. This is not enough to show direction. The hair will gently bob in place. You may see a gentle sway in the ends of long hair as the person moves forward. For coarse, tight, curly long hair, there won't be much movement there either, and you'll rarely see direction. However, the ends will move more than the roots, as the hair there is looser than the more compact hair at the roots. The movement of this hair will be a simple bob up and down. You can use little lines of motion here as well to help illustrate the movement of the drawing. This kind of movement is the same for a bob cut on straight hair. In the next video, we will be going into more detail and we will use what we've learned about blobs and sheets to actually draw hair. 6. Outline and More Detail: Now you've mastered the shape of the hair, but right now it just looks like a bunch of weird blobs. We actually want it to look like hair. It's natural to think that we would just start going in and drawing every strand of hair. However, we don't want to do that because it would make the piece look very messy. We will save that level of detail for coloring. Right now, we don't want to overuse lines. We'll only use lines if we are trying to show the shape of the hair or for drawing loose individual strands of hair. This might be a few bits of hair on the forehead or the odd strand deviating from the group on the outer parts of the hair. You can draw a few in now or add more when you're coloring in the hair. I'd recommend drawing them in later. Since I'm using a drawing tablet, I can lower the opacity of my outline. Therefore, my blobs are more of just a rough guide. If you're using traditional methods, which is most likely a pencil, you would start the outline by drawing in very lightly, or you could use a rubber to lighten it all up. As blobs and sheets were merrily there to help you get the shape of the drawing, they were only ever going to be a guide for your actual drawing. Now for the blobs and sheets, depending on where you put the sheets and if your blobs overlap, where these shapes meet will help you draw the direction of the hair. If you can see the scalp or the parting, you can also see the roots. You don't want to draw individual hairs yet, but the roots you can in order to give the impression of the hair. That's where the hair begins. You will see that the hair begins on one side of the blob. The direction of the hair will follow to the opposite side of the shape and flow on and on until you get to the end. You want to show the direction by drawing along the sides of the blobs and the sheets. You want it to be smooth and fluid, following the direction of the blob, but not showing the awkward bumps it forms. If you have layered blobs or draw more blobs in to show more detail, this will add more complexity to the final drawing. Remember, it's never a bad thing to go back and improve your image if you think you've goofed up somewhere. When you get to the end, you'll need to give another impression of the hair. Think of the ends of the hair like upside down pieces of grass. It's long and it's spiky and it goes in all directions. To determine the direction it goes, that is where the sheets come in. You can see here that this part of the hair is more a sheet than a blob, as well as this little part in the hair. The sheets do not have to be completely filled with hair. You can draw these ends within them. Now that I'm done, I can draw some more loose hair if I want. And I can also go over the hair that I have done and add a few lines to give a small impression of the hair, just simple lines. Nothing too detailed right now. This hair is quite short. Essentially, the grasp part of the longer hair is right next to the roots. We don't have to worry too much about detail. We can put this in right now if you want to, especially along the edges. I'm just assessing the drawing and adding detail where I think it's necessary. If I think it's too much, I can always go back and rub parts of it out. In the next video, I'll show you how to draw more cartoony hair shapes. 7. Cartoon Hair and Colouring Part 1: In this video, I'll show you how to draw in a more cartoony style. I'll then go on to show you how to color cartoony style hair, and we'll use that as a basis of understanding coloring more detailed hair later on. If you want to draw in a more cartoony style, it's the same process as before. Lobs sheets and then an outline with little impressions of hair to make it look real. The great thing is that you can make things look much more exaggerated. I can make things any shape I want, and I can raise the top of the hair as far off the scalp as I want. Here you see the same process of outline and detail as before. Turns the drawing from weird blobs to something that actually resembles hair. However, still keep in mind the basics if you want the finished design to look good. You don't have to draw the impression of the hair at all. You can just add them if you want to. If you are, you'll probably be doing it very minimally, as cartoon hair is often very simple. Now we're going to color the hair. This will help you draw more detailed hair later on. You draw your blobs and sheets, then your outline, and then the ends of the hair. For cartoon, I recommend a solid black marker or fine liner or a solid black brush tool if you're drawing on a tablet. If you've ever colored in a coloring book, these lines will be the lines you'll be coloring in between. Because cartoon hair is quite simple, these black lines will be part of your finished piece and you won't be rubbing them out later. Depending on the mode you're coloring with, if the light colors cannot be colored over darker parts, you should leave gaps in your drawing so you can color those lighter parts in later. For example, light tones of watercolor and most markers can't color over darker tones, but acrylic and digital mediums can. It is up to you whether you want to color the highlights in first or last. I prefer to color it in afterwards as I am using a digital art form. Next, it is important to determine the direction that the light is coming from. On the upside the light is coming from, will be your shadows. The simple shapes of blobs and sheets will help you to determine where the highlights will be and how the highlights will act, which will be different depending on if that part of the hair was a blob or a sheet. For blobs, the highlights will be situated on the closest parts of the blob to the light source. This is why if you have a more dynamic shape, it will require more blobs and you'll have more highlights. If the hair is straight, the closest part of the hair will have the only highlight. You can see that the one with the highlight used to be a blob, and the rest of the hair is a sheet at the shoulders. For sheets, there's less of a notable highlight, and it's more gradient from the lightest to the darkest. It's not always possible to make a gradient, and you might not want to shade like that. Instead, just have a medium tone and just shade in the shadows. Since this is a cartoon, you won't have a lot of tones between the lightest and the darkest. But I recommend about five. If you're using pencils or pick markers, blending two colors will give you a lot of control over the tones. If you are using Photoshop, using the gradient tool will give you a nice even gradient. Now that I have decided where my shadows and highlights will be, I can go back and clean up. Shading will give you another opportunity to add impression of the hair. We don't need too much detail just yet, but interlocking the colors like this will do the trick. Even though this hair looks extremely detailed, I still wouldn't consider it realistic. Real hair is rarely this neat and shiny. However, since I'm going for a cartoony look, it doesn't really matter. It's your drawing. You decide what it looks like. I'm using gray for a neutral look, but this will work with any color. Very rarely, even in cartoon hair, will pure white be used for a highlight? However, I want to make it as shiny as possible, so I'm going to use it. You really don't want to use too much. Just a little bit will be enough to make it look very shiny. There you have it. In the next video, we're going to go more into coloring realistic hair. 8. More Realistic Hair and Colouring Part 2: Here we have our drawing from before. We are going to color them in now. It has very similar steps for coloring realistic hair as for cartoon hair, but we are going to add a few steps in at the end. The other main difference is before when we colored in the cartoon hair, we left a black outline around it. For more realistic hair, we won't have that black outline. Any black used to distinguish shape and line will be added at the very end. Now we went to coloring the hair and not just shade it in. For that, we need to choose the colors. For these two examples, I'm going to use natural tones, but it really doesn't matter what color it is. For the model on the left, I'm going to be coloring black, and for the model on the right, I'm going to be using brown. Now we're going to pick the different tones we'll need for those colors. It's easier to get a sense of what the colors will look like with swatches. For black, we don't have a lot of choice. We won't see the shadows much, so to show depth, I'll pick a navy or dark gray or dark blue. One of the things you learn while learning to color that there are complimentary colors, colors similar to the color you want, but not the same. We won't use these colors in excess, but it will make the drawing look more vibrant. For black, I'm going to use blue. Here I'll use the navy and the dark gray for midtone, black for shadow, and lighter blues for highlights. For the brown, we're going to use much warmer colors, simple browns for mid tones. Now, the natural inclination would be to go for a lighter brown for the highlight. However, your hair is not one color. Again, we're going to use a complimentary color for the highlights. I'm going to give this hair some blonde highlights. If you just went for a lighter brown for the highlights, it would make the color look muted. This way, it adds more vibrancy to the hair. This is just the highlights. For the mid tones, I'm actually going to go for some red. However, I'm going to use this very sparingly. These colors will be the base tones. Mixing these colors together will be all I need to get an almost infinite number of different tones, which is excellent for hair because all the strands together give a lot of detail. If you're using traditional paint, you can simply get different tones by mixing various colors on or off the canvas. You're using coloring pencils, you can layer different colors on the page to get distinctive colors. And the same goes if you're using Pak markers. If you're using digital means such as Photoshop or Procreate, you should have the full spectrum of color. If you're using regular cheap markers or you don't have a lot of variety of color, you won't get a lot of range in your tones, but that doesn't mean you can't create great art. Before you start coloring the hair, I recommend practicing blending your colors together so you can gain control of what the colors will end up like. I'm just using the outline what will become my finished piece. I'm going to start my coloring in with the base color. Don't forget to leave room for highlights if your lighter colors can't be colored over darker ones. This shouldn't be a problem with acrylic or oil paints. You might end up coloring over your outlines. So it's good to do it in chunks so you can remember where the detail is in your finished piece. To get the detail in the ends, you'll use a sharp pencil or use a very thin brush while painting. This looks black on the screen, but it is, in fact, the lighter part. Once we have the base done, we can finally go into detail. If we are using pencil or watercolor where you can't paint lighter tones on darker tones, you should skip this step and go straight into detail. Now I need to decide where my shadows will be, and luckily, I still have my dark parts for reference. I'm just drawing in the base shadows and highlights to give a rough impression of the hair as I do so. Now for the fine details that will really make this piece pop. These next steps is a major difference from cartoon hair coloring. Take a color you used for the dark parts of the hair and use it to draw strands of hair in the mid tones. Do the same with the color you used in the highlights and use it in the mid tones as well. Use your mid tone colors in the dark and light parts and so on. You want to do it so every part looks like it has detailed strands of hair, but don't overdo it or you won't have any shadows or highlights anymore. If you do overdo it and you can color over darker tones, you can always go back and repaint the lighter parts. For coloring in detail in the shorter parts of the hair, you'll be using very short strokes. I can use some of my complimentary colors over the work I have done and make my piece vibrant. For the brown hair, I can add blond colors in the highlights and some red to make the hair look more saturated. If you don't think the shadows are dark enough, you can use some black but very sparingly. This is a beginner's course, but using these steps, you can get very detailed looking hair. The most important step being that you can use darker tones in your lighter tones and vice versa with thin strokes to give the impression of individual pieces of hair. You can use your darkest on your very light and your lightest in your dark shadows, but only in moderation. This will work on curly hair, of course. Just have the stroke be curly instead of straight. In the next video, we will apply all we've learned onto an actual model. 9. Drawing Hair Final Project: For your final project, I want you to pick your own reference image or get a friend or family member to model for you and use all the skills you've practiced to draw along. I'm going to go through all the stages that we have done so far, and I'm going to use this as a reference image to show you what you can do with all the skills that you've now gained. Using the same models I've been using so far, I'm going to start drawing basic shape over hair in a series of blobs. Now this is a very good image. It's very vibrant. It's nice and curly. You can see the darker and lighter tones. This part curls, but it's off the head, so it's more of a sheet. Her hair is nice and messy, so we're going to have a big blob with lots of nice and little blobs. This part where the hair curls on the right at the end is the sheet. On top of her head, there's little segments, so I can section off the hair into even smaller blobs. Now we have the basic blobs and sheet drawn. We can draw more detail and create a basic outline, which will not be seen in the final parts, but will act as our guide for the rest of the drawing. I can make this lighter, but this would be drawn with pencil initially, which you can rub out later. We're still looking at the reference image. We draw our detail and impression of the hair and the roots. The hair flows from the top of the blob or the part closest to the scalp and flows away. These roots can help us give an idea of where the direction is. Following from one blob to the next, the ends are upside down grass. This blob is a sheet, and that helps us with the direction of the ends. This part at the left is also a sheet, and this is the end, so it'll be upside down grass, very long grass. This bottom part is quite dark and we're not drawing the hand. I might do a hand drawing tutorial in the future. I'm copying from an image which will always be different from copying from a living model or from imagination alone. In my opinion, copying from real world references and your own imagination, combination of the two will always lead to the nicest pieces of art. The light is coming from above, but also from the direction of the camera that took this image. I could go ahead and draw on all the light and dark parts like I did for the other colorings I did. But at this point, I can imagine it on my own because I've had a lot of practice. And I have the shadows in this picture for reference to help me. Now to pick the colors, I can cheat and use the eyedropper tool. I don't recommend relying on this, but it's fine to get your base tones. Judging what colors to use yourself, which you'll have to do while using traditional methods anyway, will always get you richer colors. I'm going to try pick the colors just using my eye. Our base tones will be a browner version of this red. Again, the outline won't be part of our final piece, but even in traditional art, you won't see the pencil marks usually. This base color doesn't look too nice now, but it will once we apply all the detail later. Small thin strokes for the end, adding extra lines here and there because the hair is never so neat as we like it to be. You might notice, especially if you're using Photoshop that your bigger brushes will be easier to use. On the part of the hair though was one's blobs, and the smaller brushes will be used in parts of the hair that were once sheets. This is because ends usually require much more delicate, precise movements with smaller brushes. You can now see that this outline looks quite similar to an actual piece of hair, but you can kind of see where you messed up. If you took a silhouette of her hairline and compare it to this, it would look very similar to it. That's all because of the techniques you've learned in this tutorial and using blobs and sheets. Now for basic shadows, parts close up to the scalp will almost always be in shadow. I'll just do my highlights as well, but now it's time to do detail. So, small brush, taking the darkest color of the hair and using it moderately in the mid tones and sparingly on the lightest. Light colors on dark tones and so on. Now we're down with some basic detail. Using complimentary tones and trusting our eyes, we can make the piece pop. You keep layering the different strokes to get finer and finer detail of the hair and mixing all the different colored strokes together to make really detailed hair. Congratulations. You just drew realistic looking hair. Once you practice enough, this piece could take you just under an hour or even less. You'll get faster and faster the more you practice. You could spend hours on this piece, adding more and more detail and more fine strands, and eventually it will look very photorealistic. This is a beginner's course, and ultimately, if you keep practicing and practicing, you'll get even better at drawing hair. Thank you for making it through my tutorial. This has been really fun to make, and I really hope to make more of these courses in the future. So follow me if you want to see more, and thank you. See you then.