How to Draw Comic Style Hair - 3 Ways - Step by Step

1. Introduction to this Class: Hello everyone. I'm Robert Mars Zuo and I'll be your instructor for this class how to draw comic style hair, three different ways brought to you by Skillshare. In this class, I'm going to show you my process for developing hair. And that's really the direction, form and rendering. And we're going to talk about different hair shapes and different bends and folds and how to really get the hang of that and how to bring those out with your crosshatching and design work. So after completing these three different hair design and you should have a lot better understanding of what it takes to analyze the hair concepts from different photos. Redraw them in your own imagination and your own style and therefore have no shortage of ideas. I'd love to see the work that you come up with and I hope you enjoy this class. 2. Drawing Wavy Hair: Okay, so now I'm going to show you how to do some comic book style hair. And these are just some examples and we'll probably do something like how the end result here, but I'll draw another, at least one other, maybe two other hairstyles so that it's not so specific to just this one. But I think there's a lot of good information here. So I wanted to show you to kinda get the ball rolling. A gentleman, we'll start off with the sketch of the phase. I'll define the hair line like you see here. Then I'll draw in the shape of the hair and then I'll render it. So that's really the three main steps that I take are you not even know if this first one is really a stop? And really there's a little bit more that goes into the definition stage of it. But then pass that once I've got a pretty good idea of the look of the hair that way, I'll go to the rendering. Now keep in mind this middle one here. If you're gonna do a character with lighter hair, then that's pretty much almost done by itself. So you can kind of use line weight to establish the look of the hair. If you're gonna do a darker hair, you do more render work like the one you see over here. Okay, so let's go ahead and get rid of these other two examples. And let's take this one example. And I'll kind of show you how I worked through that and what I'll do just so I get a basic similar look, I'll actually keep this one off to the side. So I'll just like that. And I just want to show you how I construct this. So, alright, so from this first sketch here, I would start again by, I've already got my defined hairline and I'll show you why use that. And I'll go and soft erase this down just so it's not so in our face kind of thing. Obviously our ears get covered to solve software, he slows down. And the reason why I put the hair line and place it just gives me a starting point. And then I'm able to kind of envision where the hair flows from that point. So I picture that it comes up, it kinda turns over on itself. A lot of times when you're drawing hair, you want to think like ribbons. So even this fold of hair that you see right here, I'm kind of envisioning that is coming up and flipping over itself like a ribbon would. So maybe if you drew a ribbon, we'd kind of turn this way. But in this case we're going to have it flip over like this. So it could even, you can even make the argument that it's a little bit more flat on the top like this, probably looks a little bit more natural. And it's just one of those devices to help you kind of picture the way hair flips over and folds back over itself. So again, we'll draw that kinda have a flat tapered era to the top, have it flipped down and back. And then also you want to get in the habit of making it curve. You're going at the very end, you know, just little things like that. Even this part is too straight right there. You want to try to get a little bit of waviness into the hair. Depending on the hairstyle really. But almost all hairstyles got a bit of waviness too. It's very rare that they're completely flat. So we'll get in some basic lines. Now notice that I'm trying to space out the lines that I'm creating. That I'm not trying to draw every strand of hair. And that's really important to note because if you get in the habit of drawing every strand to here, it's going to look very stiff, very, basically very weird, but it's just not going to look soft and bellowing or flowing like hair should. So you want to like spaces, lines, you don't know. No. So I'll put a couple lines together and succession, but I won't put them side-by-side like this for fear of just making a really bad drawing. So, so what I do here is just kinda space amount. I kind of, you know, at this point I'm actually really feeling out the process. So if I didn't have that one over to the right to look at a really big experiment and even a little bit more, I guess. But this one I've already drawn does give me a good guide to work from. And also keep in mind that if you're not as comfortable drawing these from memory yet, these different hairstyles by, by no means don't feel guilty to study photos and hairstyles that are out there. And they're just stylize them, just give them your own spin. So don't, don't feel guilty in any way. You're going to change it by the time you recreate it in your comic book fashion anyways, so it's okay to study from those. And that's how you'll get the shapes in your mind to be able to do it from memory. So I've drawn lots and lots of reference, photos and depictions from photos. And like I said, you almost always change it anyways, It's never an exact copy as long as you're not tracing it or some of them, but even that's not bad if you've got a tight deadline, sounds bad, but it's really not. Okay. So, you know, so we get this shape in and you see it's a little too flat around the perimeter are a little too smooth. Things that you want to avoid when doing things like hair and just bodies in general. You definitely want to avoid too much symmetry unless you're really trying to make a statement with symmetry, you want a lot of asymmetrical value. So I want to make sure that these two sides aren't even for one another. You can change it as easy as just putting a different strand or flip of hair in front of another area. That's pretty quick to do. You can do these loose strands that just kinda fall off to the side and flow inside and around. So there's lots of ways to do that. But just remember that you want to have a very asymmetrical value to things like hair, even faces, but you tell our faces a lot more symmetrical. Okay, so now we're going to softer races down one more time. And I really use a soft erase to my advantage. What, what I feel softer race is most important for is just really building up and sculpting the work. So I like to put in construction lines like you see there. And I'll sometimes put in more lines than needed so that I can soft erase it back and just keep what I need. So it's a very sculpting type process or a buildup of the work. I always think of it almost like underpainting. So if you've ever diode paint work, you'll do underpinning to get that nice feel of texture and effect to the work. Kinda feel that way even when I'm sketching. So just my interpretation of it. So I'm looking over at that sketch to the right and one of the things I like is this hair right there, that final right there. So I'm gonna go ahead and put that into this one. So I think it adds a little bit more of an area of interest to that hairstyle, makes it look a little bit more believable. And notice I'm really skipping over bigger areas now to add these lines in. And I'm also adding a little bit more line weight. Then I previously did. So having a little bit more thickness to certain sides of the lines to try to give a little bit more depth. And it'll also skipping over a lot of those little lines that I placed them because again, they were just for kind of the construction of it, kinda the buildup of it than I do as I start to draw. And more and more of this, I make more and more final decisions and more definite committed decisions to my lines. And that's what you see me trying to do there. So now what the part here, you want to try to always hide the part a little bit. You want to stay away from getting the part to look like a line down the middle and hair going to each side of it like this. You know, unless it's really just a hairstyle that looks like that. And of course, by all means, but a lot of times the way it really looks as more like an overlapping almost like fingers locking. So it'll be a kinda as overlapping, something like this with the part of the hair. Almost like a braid but not so even kinda like what you see here and hopefully over there. So just be aware that nothing will kind of look worse than a definite line right down the middle of the head if that doesn't really match what you're going for, if that's not really the specific style of it. Okay, so now that we have that much information in place, we can really take this and start to render it out. So what I'm going to do, I probably soft erase it one more time and clean it up. Even another level, but I'm just going to jump into rendering it so that we can get onto the next hairstyle for you. Slam me, go ahead and make a copy. And I'll work off that copy, which is always a good idea. And let's go ahead and render this. So now we're going to take it even further. And I think I'll duplicate the line work just because it looks a little more good of it that way. We're going to take the the work and clean it up and render it. So it has a, if you notice this side has more line weight, which gives it a more impressive look. And again, if she was going to be a blonde or something like that or like colored hair, this would almost be pretty much done with maybe just a little bit more rendering to some sheen of light or something. So let's go ahead and work on this one a little bit further. Okay, and I'm gonna softer races again because if you look at one on the right, it does have a lot cleaner look. So that's really what we're after. Even though I could probably cover a lot of it with the rendering. But if you render too soon over some bad line work, then you'll, chances are it will still show through or you're rendering will come out a little bit less than desirable. So just, I'm just going to push this back pretty far with the soft erase and then clean it up and render all at the same time. So what I want the impression of is that she has the darker hair like the other example. So what I'll do first is I'll jump in here one more time with line weight. Line weight. The best way to explain that as you want to just have I think the best way I've ever heard it explained was you just want movement in the line. So if you think about the line going around the shapes around the forums. You want some variants in line, you want some energy to line. There's a lot of other things that come into play like where's the light source, whereas the shadow on each piece and things like that. But some people ignore that altogether. And actually just place the bolder line where it makes sense to make the form look like it's coming out towards camera. So some people use it more as a dynamic for perspective. And other people use it more as a dynamic for lightened shadow. Some people just simply make sure that as they're passing around the forums, it goes from thin to thick to thin to thick and so on and so forth. So there's really a lots of ways to interpret that. So use it how you will. But I would say the only singular rule that really exists that I'm aware of is that it looks better if you use it. I almost never see an art style that doesn't have something more to offer if it's got a good use of line, line weight. Especially in the idea of comic illustration and drawing where you don't have as much as say a painting to convey all these various things. You simply have dark and light. So line weight is a pretty important thing to employ in your work to help give that depth to your work. So again, it doesn't have to be an entire correctness as far as use of it. You can try any one of those things. So if you're using the lightened arc method, you're going to apply heavier lines on the shadow side. And as it moves towards the light, you're going to have the line get very thin and dissipate or become non-existent or whatever. So that's generally the way you use it for light and dark purposes. And if it's something where it's coming out towards camera, then the closer the objects get towards camera, towards the viewer. Prospectively, you're going to put a nice heavy line around it to showcase that. I know that works really well. I do that quite a bit. So one last thing about line weight that I've used, or I think I've noticed a lot of people using it as well this way is you can actually just use it to direct the viewer. So if it's something very integral and important in the shot, or just deserves more attention and the shot, you can use it just to direct the viewer by using a nice heavy line weight as well. So lots of ways to really interpret that. And I know this is about hair tutorial or less than or whatever, but I think it does apply. It applies to really a lot of things. So I think it's worth talking about. Okay, so again, trying to get some of these lines in there and not trying to draw every hair as much as I'm trying to put some variants and the weight of the hair and the way that the hair kind of comes together and certain areas. So I'll do these little lines where there's kind of like two lines together. So I might put a line right here and one right by it. And that's just a way for me to kind of convey a little bit of depth to that shape. Keep in mind too, if you're trying to get smooth lines. I hear a lot of young artists struggle with that. Struggle with it myself to this day. Generally the way that you're gonna do that is one quick sweeping pass. So like if you do what's called throwing the line, you'll generally get a nicer, smoother line. Now you're going to lose a little bit of control, probably given the weight of the line. But it's still going to give you an overall smoother line generally. And I have met artists that can, they do better with a nice smile. Slow poll. And say I got a little bit of jaggedness there. But I think that most people are going to get a better smooth line by the quick poll like that. So it just takes practice. It's just working with the mechanics of your hand and how you construct your work and being patient with it. But seems to be a pretty common problem for people. So if we're going to talk about it, okay, So we've got some line weight in there and it probably could stand to use a bit more in some areas. But I'm going to jump onto the rendering just so this video isn't to offer long. But that right there gives us our line weight. And now what we'll do is get rid of the other reference. One to the right will bring back the one with the shading. And we'll use that as a bit of a guide there. And we'll go back to this one. Let's get to shading this and see if we can bring it out like we did here with some darker value. Okay, So now we'll start adding in some of the shadow here. And you can notice over here that I did it pretty basic and pretty comic book style where it's, it's pretty easy to interpret. So what ends up happening here is sometimes when you simplify the work and I'll show you what I mean. As I talk about this, I'll kind of do some of this as I simplify the shadows here. What I'm basically doing is I'm trying to try to do a couple of things. I'm trying to round out the form. I'm trying to establish some highlight and shadow, obviously light and shadow. But I'm also trying to do it in a way that is very simplistic and expedited and it's just quick to do because what ends up happening? I could make this look a lot more realistic than what I'm doing here by the way, that I'm shading in here. In fact, I would say that this type of shading, at least the way that I decided to do this, almost would make it look less realistic, more animated. Now that's okay because what ends up happening? If you've ever tried to produce a book with your buddies or I don't know where you're at in your professional career or whatever. I imagine if you're watching this, you're, maybe you saw a little bit more on the amateur side, but who knows? But if you've ever done any projects for comics or anything of the sort of the narrative, any storytelling. You know, that it becomes pretty difficult to push out a complete story. That's really what separates a lot of people from being able to produce comics and to say they make comics or actually produce a comic. And so what ends up happening is you have to start thinking about ways like this where you can emulate an effect in a timely manner and in a very quick, almost easy to consume and produce type manner. And that's not that's not always easy to do. It sounds easy. It sounds like a wall. You're simplifying the work that would be easier to do. But it's doing it in a way where it still makes sense. So looks good. And it's not always the case. Sometimes we feel the need to overwork our process to kinda compensate or make something look as good as we hope it would. So sometimes simplifying something is a real process of figuring out what will work and what we can produce effectively and timely. So, so that's really the purpose of this type of shading where I basically do something a lot more simple than what I could accomplish because I could sit here and make this hair look pretty realistic. I've done it before, but it's just so time consuming and it just wouldn't make sense for any type a deadline or anytime we type of comic work. So I think when you see this type of style at stylization, it's because it suits a couple needs in the production of the work. So that's really what I'm after here. I want to, I want a pretty good look. I don't want to sacrifice too much quality In the sake of time, but at the end of the day, the work can get done on time, then you're in real trouble. So it's going to be pretty tough to keep that job if you can't produce the work. So that's where effects like this are really helpful. You see I shared that side rather quickly. And when I come over to here, keep in mind you can draw the shapes first and that's actually a little bit faster. It actually usually will give you a little bit cleaner look as well, because if you sketch the shapes, you seem to interpret it a little bit different. So you can draw these shapes pretty quickly. I usually leave little bits of highlights here and there in between. And I'll fill that N or you can just throw in a little x's and then it off to an anchor. But I'm not that lucky. I had to eat my own work so which I really wouldn't need to fill it in. But for this sake, for showing you, I want to fill it in, show what it'll look like and its entirety. And then as we come over here, same thing, we'll just draw these in. I will try to draw on these little wavy shapes and notice I don't just go like like this, I could, but it would look too repetitive. So what I do is I'll put on like a little wave and we'll bump there. It's telling me a little bit of separation for a highlight little bump there, so on and so forth. And it's sometimes easy to fall in half on the pitfall of doing a repetitive pattern and something like this. I try to fight that. And if I fill it in and it looks funny, I just redo it, but try to give a little bit of variance to that. I tried to put variants. Variants are differences in everything because it's just very rare that anything is just evenly distributed or tangents, you really want to avoid tangents and mostly your work. Okay, so there's a shadow there. Show that separation in the middle of the hair for a little depth there. Little shadows here. And the now and we get shadows again. So I like putting the shadow here on the back of the neck, the side, I guess. Because it really helps to push that depth that the hair is shading upon itself along with the head because it's in the very back of the design. So that's, I think that's a good way to kind of round out this form. Few more larger shadows at the base. I also want to shade it from the bottom up. So I think that helps to round it out as well. And then when we get over here, I need to erase a little bit of this. I'm probably a little bit of shooting right through here, so maybe shade down the tip of the hair right there, consistent with what I've done over there. And a little bit through the middle here. I don't know, something like that. And I tried to stay real careful about overdoing it with those highlights on the edges. So it can, it can actually make the hair look way too segmented. So I try to eliminate those as I go. If there's just too many of them and I kind of fall in the habit of doing that. Okay, So we'll say that the majority of our shadows and our rendering. And then now what I'll do, and actually probably a little bit of shadow right here into the air. Now what I'll do is go back and add the little bit of line work that you see there. Now the other thing that I see right across here, notice how this looks like a line going right across just like that. Just wouldn't make sense. It wouldn't be there like always think about, you know, there's, there's, there's never straight lines and in nature. So you want to pay attention to that if you see that kind of eliminate it. And I think that's kind of an evidence of that. So turn around the sodium further. I'm going to just shade this down further like this and try to bring these up. So again, I'm trying to just eliminate the look of there being a winery there. Hopefully I got that out of there. Okay. All right. So now let's go ahead and add some line work like we got here. And then we'll move on to the next hairstyle. So what this, I'm just going to use some basic tapered lines and I'm going to do any of if any cross hatching at all. Just some quick tapered lines, thick to thin. I am doing multiple pulls on these lines to get them to a tape her just some not as good at doing one quick pass and making that effect that I like. So I just pull these a couple of times. That's how I get them. And so these to me are just another way to help round out these forms. Soften up the transitions. And it's a way to create a gradient without using an actual gradient, with just using lines. And then here I'll do some lines like this. Again to push some of that back. See, I did it over there. It's sort of a thing I do. I seem to do it on everything, but I think to do it on and more tapered lines up here. So you see there are quick and easy to do or do him a lot. So I've got lots of practice. And don't worry because I'll be given lessons on the way to create these as well. Well, it's pretty, it's pretty bold. It boils down to just repetitive behavior and practice. I just do these a lot. So I've gotten to the field of my hand or I know exactly or pretty close to what I'm putting down when I do them. As far as getting the brush setting and all that, that's another matter, but all of that combined and you can get pretty good at making these little lines. And I kinda practice doing different thicknesses and different lengths of the pole. So right now I'm doing these kind of abrupt ones, but other times I'll practice doing it's kinda slow tapered effect over a longer distance. Because the more variety you have in these types of lines, the better for different areas of your illustration. I practice a lot of variants of these. And just like that. And you see that softened up the transition that gave it a little bit more of an effect. It didn't take too often, long over wasn't as quick as it could have been, but it does get the effect down. And then from here the, the inking and recoloring would really pull it all together, but that's, that's essentially how I do that hairstyle. So let's go ahead and move on to another hairstyle and so that we can come up with. 3. Focusing on Hair Shapes: Okay, so now let's try a couple other hairstyles. And again, I'll start with this one and I'll draw in the direction of the hair. Will start off very sketchy and just going to try to visualize this hairstyle. The best way to do this is to do lots of studies and create lots of sketchbooks and then pull some of these, some of the ones that become your favorite. Just pull some by art table. So that's something I've been trying to do more and more of lately. I'm going to find it really helpful. So if you've got basically some designs that you think are really great and it can be your go-to designs and you can always elaborate on a privacy, but it's kinda nice to just pin them up by your work or where you work. Give yourself that reference material. Okay, So this is the basic shape you see, it's pretty crude. But it gets the point across. And then keep adding to it and keep thinking. Or it can add another flip of hair, which way I can curl another opposite hair. Just always trying to think how I can move it around. So it's not too awfully born. So a lot of times you can take just a little piece and have it go off to the side next to the larger area. As long as it doesn't look out of place, you've got to sometimes just play around with it, see if, see if it works, but it can add a lot of style to the hair design. If you do that, don't forget to add those loose little strands that for what he seems to get it from their beautiful hair do. Okay, so let's say that that's what we want. Let's go ahead and erase the underlying part of the hair from the head. So you really don't have to have that scalp line or that hairline if you don't need it to something I feel that helps move my design. Have that out of the way. Now, we're a little bit of a ears here. This one's definitely covered quite a bit. Almost something like that. So that's our, that's our one design there. And I'll kinda do both of these and we'll go back and forth and maybe compare the differences. Okay, So now for this next one, I'm going to do one that's actually more difficult for me. So I'm going to start in the same manner. We're going to do the really curly wavy hair. So this is always a tricky one and I'll be honest, I actually shy away from it because it's seems to be pretty tough for me, but That's not how we get better as artists. So I got to show you by example, that the best way to improve upon this stuff is head on. So it's really a popular hairstyle that we all need under our belt. Can't be able to draw everybody but people with wavy curly hair that just wouldn't make any sense for your comic, right? But the reason why I think it's so tricky is the hair is so much more dynamic. So there's all these curls and all these bends and the tighter the curls, the probably the tougher it gets to say consistent, I would think. But I will give you one bit of advice that I've learned from my attempting this difficult task, so many dimes is that you want to really think about the ribbon scenario on this one. So these are, these aren't big areas of hair as much as they are. Big flowing ribbons around the, around the head or on the forums. So the more you can kind of think of it that way, it makes it a little bit easier to do. I wouldn't, I would never say this is entirely easy, but it doesn't make it easier to do. And pass that. It's kind of a composition thing. So it's getting all these curls to kind of look right at these wavy patterns to look right and do them in just the right manner. So enough of them where it looks convincing and it looks appropriate. But maybe not too many where it just looks overdone and not well thought out. So that's probably the difficult part that I've faced with this. What I start doing first is just sketching these loose lines and, and kind of trying to feel out the process in the hopes of not overdoing it, but it's probably likely to happen. And again, thinking of it more as a compositional element. So I'm studying the shape of the hair, the perimeter, the the way the, the curls are interlocking and kind of working together. I also have to think about which ones will be more in the foreground, which ones will be in the background and the way I'll shade those. So we'll get to that. I mean, maybe it's looking a little too far into it at this stage, but that's kind of how I how I see it anyways. So getting those in place. So on this side I want to see you there's going to be a little bit apart to the hair. But I want to try and not to illustrate that. Again, that line right down the middle off to the side of the hair. Something like this. And I know I told you not to draw over strand and it looks like I am drawing over strand. But in this case I'm actually doing these. These are more construction lines. In fact, a lot of these won't make it to the final cut. So what you're seeing here is me doing things a lot rougher than I normally would. Just in the sake of trying to feel out the the form of the hair hand. So again, this is almost like underpainting to a painter. It's more construction oriented. Then can you kind of refine work or maybe being confident with what I'm putting down because a lot of easily, again, probably won't make it. Ok. And now to get away from the distraction, let me get some of those. The scalp line and all that. Race.ai. Push that all back. Okay, so that gives us our shape of the hair. And I'll be it, it's still very rough, very crude, but it's a little bit closer. It gives us a direction and are quite a bit of direction, actually a lot of different directions with all these curls and everything. And that's why I think it's so easy to get confused with this. This is just a more complex hairstyle, so it takes a little bit more practice and understanding of this. Straight hair is obviously a lot easier to render. And this would be. So now after you get enough of this construction lines in place, we can now soft erase both of these down and start to clean a mop and, and make some more deliberate decisions. Okay, so now let's go ahead and render out these hairstyles a bit more. Now I need to refine them a little bit more, maybe a lot, but at least a little more. And I want this other one up here by comparison. So a lot of times I tried to work by comparison as much as possible. Always helps to give me a perspective on what I'm doing. So even if its comparison by my own work, by reference or artists I admire or whatever, it's never a bad thing to have more information around you. Um, another thing that you can create, just as kind of a helpful reminder, if you struggle to get certain things like this. Pick about five or six different shots of different references that you might like and create what's called a mood board. So I had been doing that a lot more lately with my art and it really does help. So it doesn't have to be anything that you're trying to grab from specificly. Unless you mean specific buys specific in one area of the work. But it doesn't have to be something that you're copying step-by-step or the entire thing. It can just be maybe the lighting of one picture or the the line weight of another or the style of another or whatever. You just pick anything of any of those for each image. More can just be a bunch of work that you find motivating and inspiring. But those moodboards are really helpful, especially on something that you struggle with. You can put a lot of good reference up on the board kind of thing and pull from that. So I'll give that a try. It's always helpful to do. So now back to this. So I'm just going to try to get some of this line weight and place, get it cleaned up a bit more. Trying to find these shapes in there. And I want to see. So again, trying to add a nice variants and lines, some thicker and thinner. Just to get the shapes in place with a bit more area of interest. Will flip the hair up here and there. And you know, back to the stylized thing. You can really take this as far as you want with simplifying even this stage. So I've kind of went through here and detailed a lot of little, I don't know, segments of hair, for instance, and a lot of little details within that. You could really have gotten the same hairstyle across with a lot less lines. So it's really what your choices for style and what you're after. But there's a lot to be said for simplifying the work. Again, it saves time and sometimes less is more. So it's really good to pay attention to that. Like some I always point out to people if you really want to get better with the whole less is more type thing. Draw Disney style characters because they do such a great job with minimal lines and a minimal amount of stock, her tons of style, but a minimal amount of rendering and line work kind of thing. So that they're just designed to really well. They're characters are designed amazingly well. So study those for more of a minimalistic approach. And this was something that was stuff I would say. Okay, so there's enough of our PR shapes and our design to the hair. So clean that up a bit. Now as far as rendering, I want to keep this one a little bit lighter. So what I'm gonna do here is actually just go for a couple of things I want to point out. One, you use, you want to look at these as shapes, not strands of hair. So for instance, this would be a shape. Um, I've got a few too many textured lines in here, but this would be a shape. This would be a shape, overlapping shapes like this. So again, you want to really get away from thinking these as individual wines are strands of hair. And when you start to think, Well, Ms. Shapes like that, you start to almost think about, okay, well, if this is a series of shapes and maybe there'd be a shadow here. And if this is a series of shapes, maybe there'd be a shadow here. So you start to see where you could segment it a bit and add the shading based on that. You notice too, where if you weren't, he would just shade the entire thing like this all the way across you would you wouldn't see any real separation, but you've gotta kinda perceive high and low spots. So for instance, if this bit a hair comes in front of this form a little bit, there's going to be a bit of a drop shadow right there. And so on and so forth. Like with this bulk O'Hara here, there's going to be a drop shadow there to make that look like it's in front of that. Let's see what else is going to be some shadows back here because they're receding around the face, going back into the distance. So a lot of us is going to be in shadow. We'll put the shadow there. And I, I kinda start really light with shading because it's not, I don't know, it's just not my strong suit probably, but it's got to be done. You know, it's, it's what helps propel your work off the page. So I just start small and kinda pick at it and then build up on it. Now, I actually want this hairstyle to be lighter by comparison to this one. So what I wanna do is again, just these tiny little shadows that show a little bit of separation. Little bit of a high and low spots on the hair, but not overly not overly done. And then I want to do a little bit of kinda glares. So what I'm gonna do here is just kinda sketch in almost like we did before those little lines. I'm just trying to visualize where the glare is on the hair a bit. So what I mean to say is I'm perceiving that she has lighter hair, probably blond hair or something like that. And I'm just going to add these little lines across this little heartbeat type line I put in place. And that will be the extent of my rendering. Really. It's going to be very light and very minimalistic again, so that the colorization of this hair would take a lot more effect. And it would it would automatically looked at. It's a lot lighter by comparison. Just based on the rendering lines or lack of okay. Yeah, So just like that. So pretty, pretty basic, pretty light as far as rendering goes. So then I would setback little more, check the work, had any tiny little details here and there. I could get in here and do a couple little texture lines, strands of hair, things like that. Just depends on how much detail I want in there. But really I would probably just let it go it about right there. And like I said, unless this was darker hair than I would add a lot more shadows and rendering, but I think that about covers that one. Okay, so now let's come over to here. And on this one, soft erase it again. And hopefully I'll be able to get this one chat. But I might have to clean this up twice, just because there's a lot more going on with this particular style. 4. Rendering the Hair: Okay, So I'm going to jump back in here and just start adding some darker lines. Trying to visualize some of these curls here. So line weight is really important here as well. It's always important, but I should be able to kind of really sculpt somebody's curls just with the way that I use my line weight. So probably a heavier line like that. Couple tinier ones by comparison. Again, I'll skip big areas. And you know, I also don't want to get in the habit of doing too many fronts as I could carry on this pattern like a tangent all the way back to here. But it's probably not going to make a whole lot of sons, not for really curly hair. Generally, they'll curl and then you're going to get a change. So you're going to get either a curl in the other direction like this. So that's probably makes it a little bit more sense. In the tricky part with this type of hair is just really getting the overlaps right to where they make sense. And like anything else, I don't think that this is an overnight process by any means like this is just one of those things where you have to draw it over and over again until it starts to work. The best thing to do, I think with anything like this, it's just not to shy away from it because it is complex. Like I always tell people, students that essentially I think you learn more from the hardships and are some of the things that you struggle the most with. I think those are the things that you're supposed to spend more time on because you are going to learn so much from him. We don't learn as much from the things we're already good at. You know, we, we just get confident and sometimes even cocky over the things that we're good at. But put the things that you struggle with, you. You're really forced to learn, you're really forced to beef up your knowledge to kind of overcome that. So I always go after that as much as possible. But that being said, I apparently not enough in this regard because I would already be great at doing curly hair. So I'm admitting to that I'm not so but I think I'm getting it's feeling good. I'm pretty happy with this so far, so I'll just keep going with it. So I want again, those loose little flips of hair that stray away from the pack. That's always a good thing to kind of give it another level of realism and effect. And I really want to fight the urge to draw too many hairs and succession, as well as all going in the same direction. So I'm going to try to change this area of law like that. Let me go bag. I'll just have a flip up more as it comes this way and try to separate it that way. And then we'll have some pointing downward or a here. Again, still trying to find the shapes as I do this so I can't stress it enough. Like I'm always thinking like I'm sculpting, especially with something like this where I'm a little bit unsure of what I'm trying to find. A shape lies in there. I'm just moving things around. If you notice. That's really the whole purpose of softer racing down and then drawing back over top is making these slight little edits and being, being content in that process, like being happy with making these tiny little adjustments and waiting for something to pop out and say, yeah, this looks good. I'm going to roll this. And I think that's the like the exploration of your own drawing and kind of thing. And that's, that's really what you want to look for. Because the more you can do that, the more you, you're not so flustered by the process and you, you just seem to find these happy accidents as the infamous Bob Ross would say. But it's so true and so very true like that's what you want. You want to, you want to open up your mind to these patterns, these designs you're looking for, and then commit them to memory. Want to finally figure or a model? It's going to my query here. I feel myself struggling on trying to find the shapes that I'm four there. So might reference a little bit over here and see what's working. I kinda like this little area right here follows a circulant right about there. That to me is like I always noticed parts of an illustration, whether it be my own or someone else's, that stick out as being maybe better than the rest of the illustration or parts that makes sense of the rest of it doesn't. So that's kinda what I tried to pay attention to. Sometimes you can find something in your own work to save, save yourself. Kinda. And then I wanna get these tiny little curls popping up here and they're not all in the same direction like I'm kinda doing right there. Some of them that are popping up and just kind of sweeping around to the back of the hair, back of the head or direction. And we'll start getting some of that sheen on the hair as well. So I'll start drawing some of that in I'm kinda sketch in it on this hairstyle, contrary to what I said before. But hopefully you realize with a lot of stuff that I explained, There's never a right and wrong way. There's many different ways to do this stuff. So probably just what's right for right now kind of thing. Okay, so now what I wanna do to start getting some of the shadow, It's going towards the back of the neck and it's helping to round out this big crazy mess of hair. So I'm going to do is get some of that in there. I also want to start picking apart parts of those and go, okay, what parts are highs and we'll parts or Lowe's, for instance, to me, this part is pretty close to camera or viewer compared to the rest. So then the areas that are beside it and pushing back are going to be a little bit more into shadow to propel this, this forward like that. Likewise right here, same thing. Fill like this is the part that's closest. And same thing. I want some shadow back here by the neck. So I'll just use like these little curly, curly cues or whatever to kind of illustrate that. And like back here, this, this looks like it's kind of coming from behind this area of hair right there. And that's going out in this direction. So the stuff under it, it's going to be in shadow. It does. To help reinforce that. I could also reinforce that with some directional lines like this. I'm not sure if I will, because it almost makes it look a little bit like it's at a weird angle. I might actually bring that as an under curl like this. Hopefully you can see me changing the shape. There are a little bit and try those same lines. So again, I'm constantly trying to edit this and think through it a bit. So these ones right here, probably more in shadow back here. So I would say a hairstyle like this definitely requires a lot more thought process. And the other ones did. And that's probably again, why gravitate towards those? Because I can, I can construct them without thinking too much about them. But obviously that's not going to give me as much diversity and ability and my comics and my storytelling. I've got to be able to draw all types of hairstyles. I'm going to really be able to experiment with each one of them and create variances of each one of them. So That's where stuff like this is just so important to do. And that's really why you've seen me copy the same face so that I could simply focus on the hairstyle, not even the character concept out. In fact, I almost did this with an entirely blank face. So there'd be no focus on that and it would simply be on the hairstyle. But I felt like it needed the face to kind of help with the entire drawing a woman and have interface in there, I think is important to do even making the hair look right? I guess so I figured I would use an actual drone out phase for this one. Basically a woman with no face is kind of a scary thing. Anybody who has no faces, pretty scary. So that won't work that way. I don't want to frighten anybody. Okay, so wrong by the ear here we can put more of this in shadow. We can even shade down the ear because it's going to be encompassed by all this big curly hair right there. And really the same process. So if you notice, all I'm doing is I'm trying to find these areas that are receding back. And I'm adding just a little bit of shadow and I'm making sure to go with the direction of the construction lines that are put into place. And I'll just keep repeating that process. So obviously with a style like this, you could go really far with the shading and detail work. So I also have to think about how long does it take me to construct this type of hair design? And how do I simplify it? How do I make it work? With as little as little time as possible you want you want to give adequate amount of time to whatever you're trying to produce. You don't want to fly through things for the sake of just entirely because of speed. We want quality to be in there somewhere, obviously. But you have to weigh all those things. You've got to find the balance in that. So. Kinda pick at it here and there. Now keep in mind a lot of times what will save you time is something as simple as grabbing a larger brush. So I'm working digitally, but I tried to use my digital tools as traditional as possible so that when I grab a brush, when I grab a pencil, I'm pretty at home with the experience. That's why I started anyways. But so, so sometimes just by grabbing a larger brush and forcing yourself to work through it, because it's a bit clunkier anyways, but it's a lot faster. There's actually areas where working with a larger brush, I would say hairs one of them really, but it will actually speed you up quite a bit, okay? And it will actually lend to being a bit more expressive at times. So that's another thing to keep in mind that sometimes it's beneficial to just try some different tools as, as time savers as well. Well, I'm just going to continue on with what I've got now. So I'm not going to switch and making a dramatic changes at this point. Okay, So now the other thing to think about is if this is dark hair, which I'm perceiving that it is, then I'm gonna do a lot more fill-in solve. Even though I'm just kind of still sculpting really in my mind's eye of what I'm trying to see, I'm trying to get as much information in place. I would basically take this another level and I would just bring all the shadows that you see here further out. So I would just take what's already there and I would just intensify it to make it look really like dark hair. And then you always got to keep in mind that you can, if you take it too far in that direction, you can come back with white or a highlight pen or whatever you got and paint back the highlights in the other direction. And I can take these little flips of hair on the back and I can fill those all the way and since they're going to be in the back of the hair. So I kind of again pushes those backwards in the drawing. So you see it's definitely a lot more work to get this type of design. There's just a lot more going on. But it should be more impressive. With time spent and getting, getting good at this style of hair should be more impressive overall because of all the little shading it affects the rendering that you can put into it a little bit more and we should be just about there. Now one thing I will do is if I'm working on a piece like this. And again, I think I've already mentioned it that I'm my own anchor and most of my comic work at all, but most of it. God, then I would just, I would probably stop right here because a lot of what I'm doing can just be finished off of inks. I still consider this pencils though. I still do my digital work. And the idea of like pencils than inks, which I've heard people say that they don't do that anymore, but I still do. Call me old-fashioned. And then I just keep playing with the lengths of the little flips of hair and I would add more of those little strands. So I sometimes have to like move those around to get them to look right. But I would have these tiny little singular flips of hair is use a pen or brush and just always feel like it's got a bit more realism. When there's these last-minute little clips, a hair that are kinda just doing their own thing. And then some little texture here and there. But really I have, I've incorporated enough texture on this. I don't even think I would do that. I would just keep beefing up the shadows until I get it to a level I like. And then maybe a little bit of render lines just to finish it off, like we did in the other examples. And that's really it. That's how I would do a few different styles. And obviously there's just tons and tons of different styles when it comes to hair. But I'll be honest what the things that we've covered here can translate to so many different other hairstyles. So it's really just taking the same information that we've covered here and utilizing them for a variety of things. Now I will leave you with one other example before we finish this off, so that I just feel that this gives you plenty of things to work with and learn from. So let's do that real quick. Okay, so the last thing I want to show you, and then we'll call it good is just an exercise really. So you can practice this and do this. And it should really help you to focus on the idea of what I was trying to express with designing the hairstyles. So what you can do is just draw a basic primitive shape. In this case, a kind of cylinder look and deal that's tapered at one end. And what I want you to do is go and softer racist. Because this isn't, this is just a container of the idea. The exercise essentially, he wouldn't want you to think about is if you were to take a ribbon and put it in here, how it might flow, it would be contained. And even draw through, always draw through your work. It's good to do, good habit to get into. And think how this ribbon would be contained in here and how it would coil and fold upon itself like this. Let's say that it just kinda curls up like this. Okay. So not too hard to do. I mean, it may take some practice if you're not into drawn ribbons are drawn lot of Rubens, but, but really what I'm trying to express here is I'm not drawn ribbons, I'm drawn hair and drawn really curly hair, curly lock of hair or something. But because I've thought about it in regards to this container holding it in place. And then a rubin that I can see as a, as a shape that kind of folds on itself and turns over. Then I done, I'm kinda forming the hair. Now if I take that off to the side, just to show you the comparison of it. And then I start to draw through this and really just use this as my guide. Then what I'll do is I'll just draw kind of like the way I would draw some textured hair. So we're pretty up-close to this here, so we can see a lot more of the strands even though, like I said, you don't want to get in the habit of drawing the strands. But for this particular exercise, I just want to show you how we can make this look relatively close to real hair. So now we've got to think about, does this calm and balanced back and was this what side is this? This is the just like a ribbon, is this the way it's traveling like this? We'll say it is, you know, and it's, it's little things like this that allow you to draw into your work a lot further because you thought you started thinking a lot more dimensionally. And 3D almost I always try to think like I'm working in 3D or like I mentioned before, like I'm sculpting, even though it's just a 2D image, the more you start to imagine that 3D space, the better your hearing conditions will come out, I think, as well as just lots and lots of practice. So okay. So it's turning back this way. And again, we don't have to do this type of style. It could be a very basic comic book style, very plain Jane effect. This is more of a little bit more of a, okay. I'd say an illustrative style or detailed style of hair, but I'll show you in more detail, I guess. So after we get a lot of this texture in place like before, take that and then we start to think about pair and the other regard like we did previously, high and low spots. So we've got areas that are going to have thicker little dark spots and areas that are going to be more highlighted and a little bit of a glare on to it. So I put in those little shadows and again, I'm doing this real quick just to get the idea. Down. Her down. Can't talk. Well, just like that. A little bit of hair kinda looks like hair. And then we start to think about the shadows upon itself because they're just going to shed on itself just like anything else. So you can get some of that in there. Then pass that. We're gonna we're gonna get those little flips of hair that separate. So one of the things I would do is I would change the edging of it because it's going to be Hertz and I'm going to have a smooth edge on these areas were folded over. So I would get in there and I would change the edging of that to make it look more like hair. Still don't think there's enough high and low spots, so I've keep working on that. I don't want the texture of it. Again, it's not going to have a smooth edge right there. It's going to be bumpy and some spots are going to be a little bit higher. We get that in there. And these are all just observations. These are all just tiny little observations and I'm trying to make to make it look like here. Obviously hair back here is going to it's going to have some loose ends as it's cut off or whatever it is. You're trying to think about all these things as you illustrate it. And then there's going to be these tiny little pieces that are kind of lamin around and you don't loose ends or whatever. So you're gonna get a little bit of that in there as well. So it's all those little things when you do your studies, when you pay attention to this stuff. And that's really what you're going for earlier. And then, you know, if you're doing the comic book thing, then you have to simplify this like we did in the other examples to make it work within your, your comic drawing a process. So this is a fun little exercise that you can do and play around with and see how it works for yeah, just another way to kind of commit some of this to memory and experiment and all that jazz. So hopefully this lesson has been beneficial for you and tie a thing or two and more on the way. So thank you for watching.