How to Draw Hair with Graphite Pencils: Realistic Drawings

1. Introduction: It is possible to draw some really stunningly realistic hair with graphite pencils, but it seems that a lot of people just have no idea where to start. I'm going to show you today that if you follow a very simple process, it is both very easy and I think a really satisfying process. My name is Emma Chambers and I've been making art tutorials since 2020. I have helped tons of people improve their art and shown how simple drawing with graphite pencils can be. But today I want to focus on something very specific. In this course, I want to give a really in depth tutorial on how to draw hair. I'm going to talk you through all of the materials you'll need, the general techniques, as an overview of the whole process, and then I'll show you how to draw this hair. Let's get started. 2. Class Project - Drawing Hair: The class project, we'll be drawing this hair. Now, this is a really good one to practice, partly because it's got great contrast. So it's going to be a lot easier to build the pencil up because of this contrast. It's also very clear to see the direction of all of the hairs, which again, is going to make life a lot easier. Now, we will talk you through the whole process and I'll also show you how to make this sketch. But if you do get stuck, I have included some sketch outlines in the class resources. Don't forget when you finish your drawing to upload it. I'd love to see what you've done. 3. Materials for Drawing Hair: Let's talk about the materials you'll need. So the first, most obvious material is some pencils. Now it's up to you what you use for this. I will be using some mat graphite pencils. These are pencils that don't have the shine of usual graphite. I'm mostly using these because they look so much better on camera, But you could, of course, use normal graphite if that's what you've got to hand. The most important thing is that you have some pencils of different levels of hardness. So for example, in standard graphite you need HB pencil, for example, maybe a three B and a six B. So a hard pencil, a medium pencil, and a light pencil, Mac graphite, I will be using a four and 8.12 Now, beyond the pencils, you will also need some paper. I always like to use Bristol Board when I'm drawing with graphite. It's a really lovely smooth paper that I find very easy to build the graphite on. I also find 'cause it hasn't got a huge amount of texture to it, it's much easier to get the pencil to go where you expect it to. Next up, you're going to need a few different types of eraser. First up, a Putty eraser. This is a moldable eraser. You can mold it into all sorts of different shapes and then use it to lift up some of the graphite. And you'll also need an electric eraser. This is an erasor where you press the button and it makes the end spin. I find it's very good at really accurately taking some of the graphite off, so adding in any really light details. This is the perfect type of razor to do that. Now this next material is something that you'll definitely have around the house. This is just some tissue. I like to use this to blend. And another item that you'll probably have around the house is a ruler. You'll be needing this to draw out this sketch. Finally, the last thing you'll need is some way of looking at the reference photo. So for all of my drawings, I work from a reference photo. I find it much easier to draw, realistically, if working from a reference. And what you'll need is some way of looking at that reference. So I always look at references on my ipad, but you don't have to use that. You could use your phone or you could print out the reference. So you'll need a set of pencils in a few different hardnesses, some Bristol Board paper, a couple of different raises, some tissue, a ruler, and some way of looking at the reference photo. Next, let's take a look at the main techniques you'll need to learn. 4. The Key Basic Techniques: So let's talk about the main techniques that you'll need to know to draw this hair. And I think it helps to start with to understand how to get the most out of graphite. Graphite works best by building up the different pencils on top of each other. You can see here that if I just use one pencil without blending it, it looks a bit scratchy and it doesn't look very rich. Whereas, if I layer up three different pencils, so if I put down an HB pencil, build up the shading and then give it a blend. Then put down the three pencil in exactly the same way and give it a blend. And then do the same with the six B pencil. It looks a lot, kind of deeper than just one pencil on its own. So we're going to need to build up the pencils of different hardnesses. Now in terms of how to kind of make marks on the paper, there's two main methods here that we're going to want to use. The first is called flicking motions, or I call it flicking motions. This is where you gently brush your pencil against the paper in really soft flicks and it gently builds up that hair texture. Now, the most important thing here is that you're working really lightly. If you press hard, it's just going to make some really scratchy wiry marks. And you also want to be working with a really nice and sharp pencil. Again, if you have a blunt pencil, it's going to make some really thick marks that is, again, going to look wiry. So it's well worth practicing these flicking motions. They are the key to drawing hair beyond those flicking motions. They will also be using something that I call circular motions. This is where we're trying to get down the pencil in as smooth a way as possible. So I'm working in some very small circle or oval motions to try and get that pencil down in as consistent a way as possible. I once again want to do this really lightly, which is again, made easier with a nice and sharp pencil. You'll also notice that I'm not holding the pencil really close to the tip, I'm holding it further back down the barrel of the pencil. To do this, it makes it much easier to press really lightly. In fact, it makes it impossible to press hard, or very, very difficult, at least. So those are the main things that you need to know to get started. In the next section, we'll talk about the kind of general process of how to draw hair. 5. The Process: So let's talk about the overall process of how to draw hair. And the main thing to note to start with is that we're not going to be drawing each individual hair. That would be very, very difficult and take a really long time. What we want to do is sort the hair into sections. I then want to draw each section of hair, rather than drawing all the individual strands so I can look particularly at the direction of the hair in each section, as well as the lights and darks. So making sure I get the contrast right in each section. I think once you realize that you're drawing these sections, the whole process becomes a lot easier. So the first thing I want to do is get down my sketch. I want to draw all of these sections. Now, generally speaking, I like doing this with the grid method. That is where I draw a grid on my reference photo and a grid on my drawing paper, and I just draw what's in each individual square. I find that this gives a much more accurate sketch than trying to draw it freehand. And then once I've drawn the whole sketch out, I can then erase those grid lines. And I want to make sure that the sketch is as light as possible. From here, I want to work from my hardest pencil that I'll be using for the drawing down to the softest. So if I am drawing with usual graphite, I'll start with HB pencil. Or for my drawing here with the Mac graphite, I'm starting with the four B. And all I want to do here is work one section at a time focusing on not only building up these flicking motions, so building up some of that initial hair texture, but really focusing on the direction of that hair. I can also make sure to get the lights and the darks in the right place. So building up more flicking motions where I want it to be darker and less flicking motions where I want it to be lighter. And once I've worked over the whole of the drawing, I then want to blend it so I just wrap a piece of tissue around my finger. And again, work in a kind of sweeping, flicking motion over the whole of the head, working in the same direction as the hairs. And that softens the whole drawing and removes a lot of the scratchiness from there. I want to do exactly the same thing with the medium pencil. So in usual graphite, that would be the three B, or for me that is the eight B in the Mac graphite. And I, once again, want to build up more of the flicking motions. If I'm noticing that something is slightly in the wrong place, this is a really good time for me to be able to adjust that. And I just generally want to be further building up those lights and darks so you can see it looks very similar to what it looked like to start with, but just a bit richer. There's a bit more. I then once have gone over the whole drawing, once again blend it with a tissue And I can do the same with the softest pencil, so the six pencil in usual graphite or the 12 B in Mac graphite. And I now want to be focusing a little bit more on building up all of the darkest colors. So looking at the deepest shadows and really building up a lot of this pencil in those areas. Once again, once that I've done this, I want to give it a final blend. Now from here, a lot of the light areas have kind of been lost where we've blended such soft pencils. It's turned a little bit kind of smudgy, so I want to work my way through the erasers to add that light back in. So starting off with the putty eraser, I can initially tidy up around the edges and then I just slightly lift some of the graphite in the lightest areas to brighten up those light patches. I do find I don't need to do too much of this though. Once I'm happy with that. I then want to work with the electric eraser and I want to add in all of the little baby hairs. I do think that this is the key to it looking realistic. So I work my way the whole way over the hair, adding in these little baby hairs, then give it a very light blend. And then once I'm happy with that, I can go back in at the end to start with with the hardest pencil, adding in all of the flyaway hairs around the edge. I can then go back to the softest or the darkest pencil and really define the deepest shadows. Really increase that contrast. So that's how I go about drawing the hair. Let's work our way through it. 6. Studying the Reference Photo: Now before I start drawing anything, I always like to take a minute to have a look at the reference photo. So let's have a look together and I'll show you the main things I'm noticing. And the main thing that I really want to be looking for here is all of the clumps of hair, all of the different directions those clumps of hair are going in. And there's actually not too many, There's this one at the top here, and a lot of the hair here is going in a kind of slightly curved in this direction. There's this quite thin clump here, and this is going around like this. And then there's quite a small little clump here, and this again is going around like this. And then the only other few clumps that there are is this very small patch here. And it's kind of hard to see because this is a bit darker, but they're going generally in this kind of direction. There's this patch of hair here going around and then bending at the end, and then a little bit around here, kind of curving a little bit, but it's not hugely clear the direction here because it's all covered up by a lot of these wispier hairs. And then finally, there's the bun section. This I'd say kind of has two different clumps of hair. It's got this side here and all of the hairs, generally speaking, are going up this way and then this side here where it's bending round and going round. So that's probably the most important thing to be thinking about, all of these clumps of hair and the directions that the hair is going in. It's going to look ten times more realistic if we can get that right. Beyond that, I'm particularly noticing that the light is clearly coming from the left hand side. It's generally lighter on this side, and a lot of the lighter patches are more to this side, so it's lighter here, lighter here, lighter over here. And probably the darkest area with the hair is down the middle, I guess, because this is a little bit, sort of lower. So it's in a bit of shadow beyond that, something to particularly notice. Something that I always really notice. And what I think is the key to realistic hair is all of the flyaways. And you can see all of these flyaway hairs, there's loads of them particularly around the top of the bun, but also all around here. And there's a lot, even over the top of the hairs, there's all these lighter flyaways going over the top. And even I kind of think of these ones here as kind of flyaways. You can see that the wind is clearly blowing this way because the hair is going over her face here, and all of these flyaway hairs are going in this direction. And drawing those flyaway hairs, adding hairs that are going in this direction, it's going to kind of add that bit of movement. All right, so there's everything that's particularly jumping out to me to start with. Let's start drawing. 7. Building up the First Layers: So let's start drawing now. All I want to do with this first layer is get something marked out on the paper. So I'm just wanting to use this first pencil to kind of get my bearings and work out what needs to go where. Now I'm doing this with the hardest pencil that I'll be using here. This is the four B pencil. Now I'm using the Mac graphite pencils, so this is one of the harder ones in my set. If you're using kind of standard graphite pencils, I would recommend using something like maybe an HB. Judge. And you'll notice what I'm doing here is very lightly brushing the pencil against the paper. So I'm going to work through this one section at a time. And I'm starting off with the section on top of the head. So this section here. Now, I, as I say, want to be really focusing on getting all of the hairs in the right direction. So I'm noticing that along here, for example, these hairs are going this way. Then they do have a bend around at the end here. And these hairs are going sort of around here and then bending here. And I'm wanting to not only get these hairs mapped in in the right direction, but also where possible, get some of the lighter or darker areas marked in. So for example, this area here is quite dark. There's also quite a dark strip along here and a dark strip along here. And it's generally darker down the bottom here and lighter up the top. So I'm going to want to build up those darker areas too. Now, another really important thing to be thinking about here is just really lightly making these flicking motions. Now I have got a really nice sharp pencil, and I am frequently sharpening it so that it does stay that way. And that enables me where I'm brushing my pencil against the paper to make some really nice soft marks. Now you'll see where I want to make an area a little bit darker. I just go over the area in more times, maybe put the flick slightly closer together. I'm not actually pressing harder. I don't want to press really hard. I think that that will impact what I do a bit later. It doesn't need to get to the full darkness that it will be. We can add to this more and more over time. Right now, the most important thing is getting everything mapped out. So I'm generally speaking happy with that first section. I want to be moving on and kind of expanding upon from here. So I'm looking at this line along here. There's this darker line of hairs along here, and it goes in this direction and then round, so going along here and then round. And I can start off by marking in this sort of line of hairs along here, and then I can add some light flicks. But if I can get this darker line mapped in first, I think it's going to be a bit easier so you can see me just working along here, making again, all of these little flicks, trying to get a reasonably clear line mapped out here, and then I can create some nice light flicking motions going round the corner and it's looking really nice and soft, so you'll see that there's not actually a huge amount that I'm doing here. And although I do want to try and get the lights and darks in the right place and try and get all of the hair pointing in the right direction, it doesn't massively matter, and you'll see why a little bit later on. But quite quickly we are able to map out what's here and kind of work out what's going to need to be in each area. So let's keep working through the sections one at a time. I'm going to start working through a little bit faster. So for this section here, that is this section here, and you'll notice that it is a lot darker up the top than it is down the bottom. And in fact, on this area here, there's some kind of curved wedge shapes. So here, here, and here. And I want to get these marked in and this kind of very dark wedge shape here, actually. So I want to get these marked in still using that flicking motion, but I want to get these darker shapes marked in as part of that. And I'm really looking at it's quite a sharp kind of bend in the hair here, and I can just make flicking motions going around that bend. So I find that the more areas that I add and build up, the more I may notice that I need to add a little bit more shading, a few bits of extra flicking motions back where I have been working previously. Don't feel like you, once you've finished the section, you can't go back to it if you are realizing that you want to add a bit more. So I'm making it a little bit darker around the parting as well as on a lot of these other darker strips that I've previously added in. So start focusing on the hair down the side of the face now. So this section here now, again, there are some pretty dark areas here. There's this almost a semicircle, I guess dark shape here. There's also a dark strip coming down here that looks like it was going to come around here. There's this dark strip here, and there's a little dark strip here and here as well. And generally speaking, the hair is going around in a big curve here, so kind of curving around this semicircle. So I think it's easier to maybe here, map in those darker shapes and then add the lighter flicks around them. Now, I can't stress enough that, although I am trying where possible to get As closer match as I can to the reference. It doesn't need to be absolutely perfect. As long as the hair is roughly going in the right direction, then that will be fine. I do like to work, I'd say reasonably quickly, we don't need to stress about drawing every single hair here. It's on the side of the head here. I just want to add a little bit here. So there's this darker couple of strips here and a darker strip, sort of curved strip here. And then the hair here is going sort of round and up. And then this section here is what I want to be drawing next. This is nicely framing the edge of her face, and there's, again, reasonably dark pieces of hair, particularly here, along here, and all down here, just this strip here. And all of the hair is going in a kind of reasonably, I guess what you would expect, direction is going down and around. So you can see me drawing in where those darker areas are and just adding some very light flicks. So generally speaking, the thing that people mostly do wrong here is either pressing too hard so that the lines are really thick and they don't look as nice and soft and natural, or not having a sharp enough pencil. And again, the lines look too thick and it ends up looking very kind of wiry. The absolute key to this whole method is making some really nice soft flicks with the pencil. So now I'm generally happy with the left hand side. I want to move onto the right hand side and once again start looking at these one clump at a time. So starting off looking at this section here and again, there are a few areas that are a lot darker, particularly close to the edge of the hair, close to the parting all around here. There's also some darker strips going through here and through here. And it's also a bit darker at the back here, this little patch, and not as much as here, but is a bit darker here as well. And all of the hair is generally going in this direction and round. Now, whilst I'm drawing this section, I am also going to draw in this section here. And this is probably one of the darkest areas of hair in the whole drawing. It's particularly dark around the edge here. And then the hair appears to be going along here and round. It's a bit hard to see here because it is so dark, but I think it's kind of a bump, I guess. So I want to be drawing it going like this. So let's make some flicking motions going in those directions. Adding more flicking motions over the areas that need to be a bit darker. Now, don't worry if building up some of the darker areas by going over more times with blinking motions ends up making it look a little bit scratchy. We will smooth that all out in a little while. It should look something like this on that very dark patch at the top. That's how it should look right now, so it's not looking as dark as it should, but that's okay. Now, whilst I'm drawing in this section, this is all exactly the same as what we've been doing before. Let's just take a minute to talk about the parting, because I think the parting of hair is an area which really makes a difference in whether the finished piece looks realistic or not. I think if the parting doesn't look realistic, then it really impacts on the whole drawing. So around the parting, what I don't want to do is have a really straight edge. I don't want the edge of the parting to be a really perfect line that's not going to look realistic. So you'll see that I am brushing back and forth. You can see me going to the edge of the parting. Here I am brushing back and forth with the pencil. And I would really say, I'm just not being too accurate about it, which is deliberate. I don't want to try and make a really perfect line around the edge. And if I kind of roughly go back and forth making these flicking motions with the pencil, it will end up looking more realistic. So let's keep working our way round. Still really following the direction of that hair and looking for any areas that are going to need to be a bit darker. So for example, around here, it's really only this patch here that looks a bit darker. On the most part, it's reasonably light, I would say around here, so maybe along here and along here, but there's this lighter hair down here and maybe it's a bit darker close to her face here. So here and here, Judge. But there's a lot less hair around this section, so there's not a huge amount to do here. So now, at this point, I'm generally happy with all of the top of the head areas that I've marked out. But you may well have noticed that around the edge of the hair line there is a lot of kind of wispy hairs. So all around here there are these hairs that are some reasonably long and going in this direction, or as we get here, they start curving around and going more in this direction. And I do want to be adding some of these in. I don't want to just leave it as a really crisp line, which is what I've got at the moment. So it fill in this area here. The hair line doesn't look quite right. It looks like the hair isn't coming quite low enough. So I'll just again, use these flicking motions to add that in a bit clearer and then I can start adding all of those little kind of wispy hairs around here. Now again. It doesn't need to be perfect. We are going to be blending this in a little while. What I want to do is just start to get an idea of where these are going to go and the direction that they're going to go. Because as I said, on the right hand side they're kind of pointing down, but on the left hand side they're curving to the left. And I think it's very important to get the baby hairs mapped out. As I say, I do think they are the key to realistic hair. We're not going to worry about all of the little flyaway hairs around the edge or over the top of the drawing at this point, but because it's so thick around the edge of her face, I do want to get this marked in this. Also add flicking motions all along here. And then as I add these in, it does start to make me realize that maybe the parting is a little bit too wide. So I'm just going to very kind of roughly add some extra little flicks along here, and you can see that, that quite quickly kind of narrows the parting. Now, again, I'm not being too precise here because I do want it to look quite natural, but I wouldn't worry too much about it because we are going to blend it and now I'm a bit happier with the parting. I can keep adding these flicking motions along here. Just really builds up some more of this hair. Now, the last section we want to draw is the bun. Let's take a look at the direction of the hairs on here and see if there's any darker spots we're going to need to map in. Now on the bun, the left hand side is particularly light and we're going to want to still build up some flicking motions here, but really not a huge amount. We're not going to want to make this side dark at all. I am noticing that all along here it is pretty dark. It's as dark, I would say here as it is here. And then there's some darker patches running through here and here. And there's some darker patches along here and up here a bit, maybe even around the edge here and along here and beyond that, I once again want to follow the direction of the hair. So, as I said a little bit earlier, I think that the bun is kind of split into two sections. It's got the section on the left hand side which has quite a kind of large, I guess bend in it, which I'm just marking in here. And then the other side of the bun is a little bit kind of straighter, Judge. You can see me just adding the flicking motions, going back and forth, and I do think it looks a little bit scratchy at this point, but I honestly wouldn't worry about it. So once I've gone over this section, I pretty much mapped in the whole of the hair. Maybe I'll just add in a few of the little flicks around here, but there's not a huge amount to do around here. And then we have something, the whole section on this section, there are a lot of kind of very small loose hairs. I'm just still very lightly making flicks with the pencil, trying to follow what's on the reference, but I'm not going to worry too much about making it perfect. So at this point, I'm generally happy with the hair. What I now want to do is start making the darker areas a little bit darker. So obviously, we went over them a number of times with the flicking motions to make some of the darker patches a bit darker. But I want to make them even darker and maybe a bit softer than that. So what I'm doing here is going over those darker areas with circular motions now, so I'm no longer worrying about building up the texture. I'm happy with the texture that I've got. I'm just going over the top in these small little circles, still very, very lightly. I don't want to press hard and just building up more of the graphite. So particularly around the parting as I mentioned, it is just a lot darker around this area. And then I'm generally speaking, I'm just looking for the darker patches. So for example here, this is an area that is a lot darker on the reference. And generally around the edge of the face, I would say is a lot darker than what I've got at the moment. Now, do you think it looks maybe a little bit peculiar when I first do this, but remember this is only the first layer of pencil. We will be building a lot more up on this, so more going to work around the Bun itself. As I mentioned, this patch here is really very dark. So again, using these light circular motions in this patch. Very lightly going over the area. Now something I am doing to help me work nice and lightly here is holding the pencil further back than you might think. I'm holding it maybe halfway down the barrel of the pencil. If I held it really close to the tip, I would still be able to press lightly, but it would be a little bit harder from a pencil control point of view where it would have to focus a lot more on it. I'm holding the pencil back here and just very lightly adding in these circular motions. Now, I don't expect it to be black, what I'm doing here, I just want to build up a little bit more of the pencil and just kind of add to what's here. So let's do the same on the right hand side. So this area here, as I mentioned, is very, very dark. Now, I am mostly using circular motions. I'm slightly going, kind of around the bend, going over that you can see me doing, just to kind of try and help it blend into the rest of the hair. And then this patch here, there's a particularly dark spot in this area here. You can see this dark patch here that I haven't really got marked in at the moment. It's made to look a little bit lighter because there's some light flyaway hairs going through it, but it is actually pretty dark. So I can again use those circular motions to go over this patch, make this patch a little bit darker. And again, also, all along the hair line here I think needs to be darker. So once I'm generally happy with the hair, I'm happy that I've mapped everything out. I'll add a few last little tweaks, just a few last little flicking motions to add a tiny bit more detail in. At this point, I think it's pretty clear what needs to go were. What I want to do at this point is think about blending it and smoothing it altogether. So what I like to do, I like to do this with a tissue and all I do is wrap the tissue around my finger, and then I use this to go in the direction of the hair. So I'm just very lightly rubbing my finger against the paper, and you can see that it's making everything look much smoother. It's kind of giving it a much softer look. You can still see all of the flicking motions. You can see everything we've built up. But it's like a much softer version of that. And this is why I was saying, it doesn't matter. You don't want to get everything absolutely perfect because we are just going to blend it. And so I'm working one section at a time, always making these flicking motions with my finger following the direction of that hair and just smoothing everything out. And what this does is remove that graininess and you kind of end up with a blurry version of the hair. So I want to make sure that go over the baby hairs at the edge as well as the bulk of the hair. And then I also want to be going over the bun at the top again. You can really see me going in the direction of the hair here. So by the time that you've gone through and blended all of this, you should have a head of hair that looks something like this. Very clearly mapped out what needs to go wear, but it hasn't got any detail or really any contrast. But we can start building up the contrast in the next section. 8. Build up Some Softer Pencil: So now we've got something down on the paper. This is going to get a lot easier. And what I want to be doing now is doing pretty much exactly the same as what we did just a second ago, but with a slightly softer pencil. So a slightly darker pencil. Now I'm doing this with the eight pencil. This is the mat graphite pencils. Again, if you're doing this with kind of standard graphite, I would use maybe three B. And I'm once again going to want to go over all of these areas with flicking motions. And once again, I want to make sure that I've got a really nice and sharp pencil. And you will find that as we work our way towards the softer pencils, you will need to sharpen more often. Because they are softer, they need sharpening more, they wear down faster. So do be aware of that. But beyond that, it's really just a case of going back over what we've done before. So you'll see that I am once again just gently brushing my pencil against the paper to gradually build up some more of this texture. So although we did build up a lot of texture with the last pencil where we blended it, it didn't get completely lost. But it's certainly much softer than what it was. And I want to build it up a bit more now. As I say, I think this is all far easier this time because we do have this kind of framework already built up. We're just going back over what's already here. I can already see the direction of the hairs. I can also see where the darker areas need to be. And I'm just going back over it. You'll notice that once again, I'm going over the darker areas more times with the flicking motions. And a little bit later, we'll add those circular motions and add some extra shading over the top to make it darker. But for now, I just want to go over those darker areas with the flicking motions just a few more times. Still remember, whatever you're doing to press really lightly, and I'm just going to let the pencil gradually build up. Now I do think as we get towards softer pencils, it ends up looking a little bit more wiry. Even when you are doing really nice gentle flicks. Don't worry about that, because again, we will be blending this to soften it all. Just try and make really light flicks with a sharp pencil and that's all you can do. Now, this little area here, I do want to make reasonably dark, this little flick here, and then I can keep adding flicks going around here, just like we did before. Now, do you need to add a reasonable amount around the edge of the base, along the bottom here? And then I don't think I need to add as much up the top around this kind of area here just because it is that much lighter. I think what you'll find is you'll see a lot more difference on the darker areas whilst using this pencil versus the lighter areas, and that is what you're expecting. The darker areas will change a lot and start looking a lot darker already. The lighter areas won't look too different. So there's this little darker curve here that I'm not sure actually that I marked in before. But I'm noticing that this darker patch does need adding, so I can add that in with these little flicks, building that up. And then I want to add a lot of the pencil around the top up here. As I mentioned before, this is a particularly dark spot with quite a lot of dark, kind of different patches and shapes. So we will need to be building up a lot of the graphite around here. So let's go over as well, some of the darker areas along the side of the face here. Still just very lightly brushing the pencil against the paper. I don't want to have really abrupt edges to either side of the sort of hair strokes. I wanted to try and look as soft as possible, particularly where the hair's meeting the face. I want it to kind of be a bit kind of feathered, I guess. Let's draw these darker sort of semicircles around here and build up all of the flicks around here, as well as this very curved section of hair just beneath it, adding a little bit more particularly over to the right hand side. And then there's only a little bit that needs to be added on this section underneath. There's not a huge amount of hair that you can clearly see here, but I do need to be adding a reasonable amount on this patch just because it is that little bit darker. So let's go back over these kind of wispy hairs towards the edge along here. And honestly is so much simpler because we're just going back over what we already drew previously. I am still looking at the reference photo as I'm drawing here. I'm not solely relying on the base shading that I added in, but it certainly helped primarily though I do want to be using the reference photo as the guide. Judge. I think it helps if maybe if I made a mistake previously, now is a good time that I'm able to adjust it, Particularly if I'm comparing my drawing to the reference. It will potentially become quite clear quite quickly if there's something that I've got slightly in the wrong place or if I've got the hair going slightly in the wrong direction and it's a good time to correct anything like that now. So again, I just want to be a little bit careful around the parting. I don't want to be doing anything kind of too precisely then I can start adding in this darker patch here. So going back over it, exactly the same as we did before, going over these flicks before then moving onto this section underneath. Now we would say that second time through, I go through this a lot faster partly because I don't have to spend as long mapping everything out well. So I'm having a slight, maybe slight shift in focus towards some of the more midtone and darker areas rather than really focusing on the lighter areas. Judge, to give you a bit of an idea, the first section where we were putting down the Four pencil, I spent about 45 minutes doing that. Whereas this section here, I'm spending about 30 minutes doing this. So it's a little bit faster. Not hugely faster. I am spending a bit less time on it. So in this section here, again, I want to be following the direction of the hairs, and I'm noticing that it's darker towards the top and also where the hair is meeting the kind of hair line, I guess. So quite quickly, this is looking similar to what it did, I would say before we blended it, but just a bit, sort of stronger, J all the shading is a bit stronger and it just looks a bit deeper, a bit more detailed. So let's go over these few sort of baby hairs, I guess, around here, these much finer hairs around here. And I'm just going to go over this edge section here a few more times, and then I think I'm generally happy now with how the kind of bottom section of the hair looks. I want to focus now on the Bun section, and I'm primarily wanting to focus on where the bun meets the rest of the hair, as I mentioned before, particularly around the left hand side, that needs to be very light, so I don't want to put a huge amount of pencil around there. I'm going to focus on building up some of the darker strips more towards the right hand side. So I'll gradually build this up with flicking motions. Once again really focusing on where the bun meets the hair. So particularly all along this line, particularly around here, it's so much darker, you have to kind of look past all of the fly away little baby hairs to see how dark this is. That's particularly what I want to focus on building up. You'll notice that I haven't right now, done anything to the left hand side where it needs to be so much lighter. And then actually I want to think about making some of these darker areas even darker. So we're going to go about this in exactly the same way as what we did previously. Let's just add a few more little flicking motions along here. And then I'm going to use those circular motions to make this a little bit darker. So still pressing very lightly, I'm working in those circular motions, building up more of the pencil in these areas. Now, you might notice that I'm not holding the pencil as far back as I did previously. That is because I am now wanting to be a bit more accurate with where this is going because we were just building up kind of the base layers, I guess, in the last section, Judge. Although I was obviously trying to get everything in the right place, it didn't matter as much. Now, I'm trying to be a bit more precise over where the pencil is going as we're getting towards the softer pencils and therefore darker pencils. But I'm still pressing very, very lightly. I'm really focusing on my pencil control and on making sure that I am pressing lightly. So I've gone around the darker sections on the bun. I want to be doing the same around here, for example. Again, pressing nice and lightly, and just gradually, it's kind of making it a bit darker, but also smoothing out some of the scratchiness that's around here. But it's really exactly the same areas as what we did before. It's amazing how much layering up the graphite like this creates such a richer color than if we didn't do this way. I'm going to add a little bit of shading around the very edges of the parting just to smooth that out, make it a little bit less kind of bright white. And that's making it look a lot more natural. And then I can keep working my way around some of the darker areas along here as well. Just making this a little bit darker. Mostly around the edge, but also there's the odd area like around here that needs to be a little bit darker. I think it's quite important where the baby hairs are meeting the rest of the hair just to give that a little bit of shading to help kind of blend these two areas together. And of course, I want to build up a reasonable amount of graphite on this area here. This is just a particularly dark area, I would say. So once I'm happy that I've gone back over all of those darker areas, really built up some more of the graphite here. Again, we're still doing exactly the same as what we did previously. So I, once again, want to be getting a piece of tissue now. I've wrapped it around my finger in exactly the same way, and I'm still following the direction of the hair, so just lightly brushing my finger against the paper to just slightly smooth out what's here. Now something you might notice here is that we're really starting to lose the lightest areas. It's looking a little bit kind of midtone and a little bit maybe muddy, but don't worry about that. We can always add the lightest areas back in and don't worry about adding in any of the flyaway hairs. We'll put those in a bit later as well. Now, you'll notice here that I've just turned the tissue round to put it on a different part of my hand because it was getting a little bit kind of muddy. Always remember you can put the tissue on a different part of your hand or get a clean piece of tissue if it's just turning into a big, smudgy mess. But at the end of this section, you should have some hair that looks like this. 9. Build up the Softest Pencil: Now let's start using the softest pencil we will use for this drawing. So I'm using the 12 pencil here. Again. If you're using sort of standard graphite pencils rather than Mac graphite, maybe five or six B is what I would look at. And all I'm wanting to do here is very similar, again, to what we've previously done. But now I'm really, really focusing on only putting the pencil in the darkest areas. So by now you're probably reasonably familiar with where these darkest areas are. Primarily, for example, to start with around the parting and it's the same rules. Once again, I want to be making sure that I have a nice sharp pencil, so I'm going to need to sharpen it, probably slightly more often than I did with the eight B pencil just because it is that bit softer pencil now. And I want to once again be working with these flicking motions. Now I am, I would say taking my time a little bit more, really thinking about if there's any final adjustments I want to make. So if I want to maybe slightly tweak the direction of the hair, for example, then now would be the time to do it. I think once I've used this pencil, I don't tend to try to change anything after that point. So you'll see I'm working around putting in these flicking motions in exactly the same way as I did before. Adding closer flicks and more flicks in an area that needs to be darker. So again, I'm looking at this area here, which is probably, as I've said before, one of the darkest areas in the hair. And I want to be really building up a good amount of the pencil in this area from here. I'm going to keep working my way around the parting just because as I've said before, it is generally quite a bit darker around here. Then I'm going to start working my way over some of these darker patches On the other side though, I say it's generally easy to see where I need to build this up because I have already built up these dark patches a few times and then I've blended it so I can go back over again near the parting here, but also going over a few of these darker strips along here and really making this little curve patch here. I've spoken about it a few times, making this patch a little bit darker and then I can keep building up around the edge. Generally speaking, I would say that it's around the kind of edge of the hair as well as the odd patch like here that's a bit darker. I will add a few little flicks in, for example here where generally speaking it is a bit lighter, but I just want to up that texture a bit, but I don't want to do a huge amount in there. But on the most part I would say that I am wanting to go over all of those dark patches that we've spent so much time building up. So looking at this little triangular spot here, for example, this lost a lot of the darkness that it had. So I can build that up, build up flicking motions at the bottom as well. And then I want to go over these patches at the top. Now, as I've said again a few times this area is particularly dark and there's some very strong shapes up in this top section here. I just want to make the whole thing look more defined. Just make it a lot richer. So I can go back over these, You can see I'm still flicking the pencil back and forth, allowing this pencil to build up. And because it's such a soft pencil quite quickly that dark value really mounts up. Let's also add some more flicking motion, some more shading, particularly down the bottom, down the bottom of this section. So that's all around here, adding some darker shading around here, around here. And then I will be adding more around here, and around the edge here, you can see that quite quick, it ends up looking a lot more defined. As I always say, the key to graphite pencils contrast if you can get the contrast right. If you can get the lights as light as they should be and the dark as dark as they should be, it is going to look good. So I'm just going to go back over these darker patches around the parting again. I don't think that they're looking quite dark enough. That's okay. I can go back over it, build it up a little bit more, maybe adding a few little flicks higher up in the hair just so it doesn't look quite as bright. And then I can start focusing on this area here, this little darker semicircle, Get that marked in. And building up all of these darker areas, like I mentioned a second ago, around the edge, particularly just to help give this area a little bit more shape. So there's not a huge amount to do on this area down here. It's not generally, I would say too dark, but there are a few small patches that I have marked in before. And now that I've done that, I'm just going to go back over these baby hairs over the edge one more time. After going along the edge of the top section. It really shows that these areas after going along the edge of the top section, it really shows that these areas need more depth building up. So I can once again use slicking motions going along, working in the same direction of the hair here as I've done before. And that's looking like a much more realistic edge here now, and you also want to go over this darker patch here. Again, exactly the same as what I've done before. We've gone over exactly these patches before. So at this point I'd say that I am generally happy with the left hand side. Let's now focus on the bun, once again. Towards the bottom, closer to the rest of the hair. It is much darker, and then it gets lighter as it goes to the top. And it is also lighter on the left hand side. So I'm going over this in exactly the same way as I did before, building up all of these flicking motions. And I can use what I've already marked in as a really good guide on what needs to go, where I am. Building up a lot more of the flicking motions, building up a lot more of the texture, closer to the bottom. Now again, I think you'll still notice that it looks a little bit scratchy, but we will, once again, we'll sort that out either through adding in some extra shading like we have done in the past or by blending it way. I'm going to add a little bit of this very soft pencil around here. I don't want to do a huge amount because as I say, the left is quite a lot lighter than the rest of the hair. But I do want to add something. I think it just adds that extra little bit of detail. And I'm also going to add a few more flicks around some of these patches here just to kind of help make them blend a little bit better. So I'm generally happy with the middle. Now I can start thinking about adding a few more flicks over to the right hand side, but I don't think it needs as much up here. Most of the shading, as I say, is more towards the center. And then once I'm happy with the bun, I can move onto the right hand side of the head. So again, adding extra shading around the edge around here. Particularly the hair that's closer to the scalp, going back over some of these darker patches sort of in the middle of the hair where I've previously marked out. I'm just generally working my way around the edge of this whole section. Then it will add a little bit of some extra flicking motions on some of the lighter patches. I just think it helps give it that extra little bit of detail, but I don't think it really makes it that much darker, to be honest. And then once I've filled in this patch, have gone all the way over to the kind of edge of this clump of hair on the right hand side. I can now go back, just add a little bit more shading where I think it needs it generally in this patch. Now I'm looking at this patch as a whole. So particularly towards the edge, again here. And then once I'm happy with that, I can again, go back to these baby hairs. Just lightly putting some of these in. I can't stress enough how important it is that you have a really sharp pencil. You're going to get some much nicer, more realistic lines with a sharp pencil than you would if you try and do this with a blunt pencil. And I'm going to go back over all of these baby hairs in exactly the same way as before. Just lightly making these flicks. In many ways, I feel like every time we've finished a section before we blend, it always looks pretty much the same. It's just that we then blend it and it becomes a softer version and it looks a little bit darker every time. Now you will notice when you blend this time it will really, you'll end up with just really dark and midtone areas. Any light areas will be pretty much lost, but that's okay because we can add those back in. So let's go over these last few parts over on the right hand side, adding back any final tweaks that I see. Maybe if I think I need to add a little bit more shading around here, for example, or I'm just going to tide you up along the edge, add a lot more shading along here. You can see I'm switching to circular motions for this section, just like we did before, making this whole line along here a lot darker. And I want to do this anywhere that needs to be extremely dark. So particularly along the edge of the bun, and also along this section here. So you can see that I'm just building up this color with those circular motions so that it is as dark as on the reference because it does look nearly black. I would say also gonna add a little bit of extra shading around the back of the parting here. Just much lighter than I'm doing elsewhere. I want to try and get that, that little bit darker and I'll do exactly the same on the other side. But once I've done that, I think the parting looks a little bit too bright white. So I'm just going to very, very lightly go over, particularly, the edges, and then lightly up the middle just to tone down that parting, make it look a little bit more natural. And then I'll just add in a few final tweaks here, a few final extra parts where I need to add a little bit of extra shading. So once I'm happy with this, I want to give it one final blend. I won't be blending again after this point, because we will be adding the light areas back in. And I don't want to lose them, so I don't need to do a huge amount of this. I am going to do it in exactly the same way as before. I've got a clean piece of tissue here and I'm once again just brushing my finger against the paper in the direction of the hair. You can see as I say, I'm not doing a huge amount because it does get pretty smudgy, I would say at this point. But by the end of this chapter, you should have some hair that looks like this. It does look a little bit smudged and it's very dark and mid tone. We want to be getting those lights back in next. 10. Add the Light Back in: What I want to do now is add all of the areas of light back in. And I'm going to do this with both a putty erasor and an electric eraser. But before we get started with that, I'm going to use the putty eraser to just tidy up around the edges, a lot of the areas where we blended with the tissue. It's just smudged some of the pencil onto the paper and it will look a lot better if we tidy that up before we get started. So you can see I'm just going around the edge and cleaning that up. Not doing that both around the edge and on the inside here. If I was drawing a face here, then it probably, to be honest, wouldn't matter as much. But I do want this to be nice and clean, white. So once I've tidied this up, what I want to do is use this eraser to add in some sort of larger patches of light. And then the electric eraser to add in some of the flyaway hairs. So what I want to do here is mold the eraser. You can see here, I've molded it into kind of a flat shape. And I can use this to create some light lines in the hair. So some of the areas of the hair ideally would be lighter than they are, so I want to use this eraser to put those light patches back in. So particularly, for example, around here, you can see that this is quite light actually here. Around here, around here, and around here, for example, on this bend around here and around here particularly, those are the kind of areas that I want to be putting that light back in. So I need to frequently remold the eraser, but I'm always molding it into that same flat shape. And it's all very similar. I want to once again be brushing the eraser against the paper and it again makes these flicking motions, just like we've had before. But now is making kind of these nice hair motions with light now. We weren't able to add these areas of light back in until now because every time that we blend, it would have just made the whole thing muddy again. We would have lost these bright areas. And because I have to keep remolding the arrays, the array would say it's kind of time consuming, but I have to say it is my favorite part of the whole drawing. I do really like adding the light back in. You can see what a huge difference it makes. So, so quickly with just brightening everything up and giving it that extra kind of glow. So once again, working my way around reasonably systematically. So I started around the center and I'm working my way over to the left hand side. And pretty much any area that needs brightening up a little bit, I'm taking some of that graphite off with this party eraser. It's just a really good way to brighten up what's here, but I wouldn't say it necessarily makes a massive, sort of really stark contrast. It's just literally just brightening it up. So as I'm happy with that left hand side, I can start thinking about sort of the right hand side and the bun at the top. So as I've mentioned before, on the left hand side of this bun is extremely light. I do want to remove some of the graphite here, but I don't want to do too much. I don't want to lose all of the texture I've built up here. I just want to brighten it up a little bit. And also just brighten up just a bit along the top of the bun here where this section is meeting the top section. And then there's a hair along here that's particularly bright that I just want to brighten up. And then a few areas around the top of this section as well, but there's not, I would say as much on the right hand side than on the left, mostly because the light is particularly coming from the left. So once I'm happy, generally with those light areas that I've added back in, I'm just going to go briefly back to the 12 B, just to slightly adjust a bit of what's here, particularly, this area just needs to be a little bit darker. Sometimes these things become suddenly very apparent. So I'm just going to add a little bit of extra shading here and then I can move on to the electric eraser. So let's take a minute to have a look at the reference and I can show you what I'm seeing. So what I want to add in now is all of these light flyaway hairs, and you'll notice that there's a lot of them. They're all over her hair. And I do, as I've said before, think that these are the key to making it look realistic. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on one area at a time. So I'll start around here, for example. Use the eraser to put in this hair and this hair and try and where possible, get them reasonably similar. Trying to get them where possible in the same direction. So for example, there's a bit of a cross here, for example. I do want to add that in. I find that the electric eraser works best if I press very, very lightly. Sometimes I think the temptation is to press quite hard, but I don't think it works as well if you do that. Now the reason that I am trying, where possible, to follow what is on the reference photo. So this cross, for example, is because the flyaway hairs are so random. That's what makes them look natural is that they are just a bit all over the place and it's very hard to be random. Generally speaking, people work a bit more kind of methodically, so if I follow the reference photo where I can, then it's going to end up looking a lot more random than if I just try and do it out of my own head. Now something that I do with the electric eraser is I periodically just cut off the very tip of the eraser. You'll find that once you've raised a certain amount, it will stop taking the graphite off as well and it'll start making a few kind of muddy marks. What I do is I just take a craft knife and I cut off the absolute smallest, little sliver just so I have a nice and clean tip. And then I carry on. And I think that that makes it much easier to work with. So what I'm doing is working over the whole of the head, adding in these little hairs. If some of the lines look a little bit too chunky like that line I did a second ago, that's okay. We can always adjust with a pencil at the very end, and don't worry that it's not necessarily looking supernatural at this specific moment. That's okay, 'cause we can adjust that as well. So the main areas where there's a lot of flyaway hairs on this head of hair is particularly, I think, around the hair line as well as where the bun is meeting the rest of the hair. So along here. So you really want to add a lot of these little flyaway hairs in this area. I don't actually necessarily add the same amount though as on the reference. Sometimes I think that, that can look a little bit too busy. I tend to do it until I think it looks about right, so that it doesn't look like too much. So I'm quite liking how that's looking up in the bun now. So you might notice that although a lot of the hairs on the reference photo are quite a lot lighter than the rest of the drawing, they're may be not quite as light as what the eraser is making. Here, these are some very, very bright white lines. So what we want to do is ever so slightly tone down these lines. So what I'm going to do is go back very gently with my tissue and add a very small amount of blending over the top of these lines just to slightly tone them down. You can see how gently I'm doing this. I'm really not putting a huge amount on here because I don't want to accidentally smudge everything into all of those light spots that I just added. But it is really toning down the light spots. It's making it look a lot more natural that then we can work on and work with a little bit easier. So from here, so I'm liking how this looks now, but I am noticing that some of the flyaway hairs are definitely lighter than others. So for example, this hair here, this hair here, this hair here, are much lighter than a lot of the other hairs. So what I'm going to do is get the electric eraser back again and just go over those odd hairs so that they are really nice and bright. But the other hairs, although you can still see them, they're much more subtle. So I don't need to add a huge amount back in here. And I'm really doing the same as I was with the previous hairs, but it's just making that slightly more natural look. Now, at this point, I'm generally happy with the hair. It's nearly finished. What I want to do now is we've added all of those light areas back in and really brightened everything up. What we need to do is get the darkest areas and the final details in, in the next section. 11. Add in the Final Details: In this final section, what I want to focus on is adding in the final details, the final little flyaway hairs, as well as any extra areas of contrast that need adding in. So I want to start here with the flyaway hairs, and actually I'm going back to the four B pencil. This is the hardest pencil that's in my set because I want to add in all of the dark hairs around the edge. I particularly want to be making some very firm, crisp lines. So I don't want to use a softer pencil and I'm not too worried about it being really dark. And what I'm doing is, again, using the flicking motions that we've used a lot throughout. And I'm using the reference photo as a really good guide. In exactly the same as the light hairs adding in these flyaway hairs just from your imagination is never going to look as good as if you use a reference as the guide. Because as I've said before, they are all extremely random and it is hard to be that random. So let's take a minute to look at the reference and we'll see what is here. And hopefully you'll be able to see what I'm doing. So you can see how many of these little flyaway hairs are around the edge. Now you'll notice that the flyaway hairs on here are white. But what I'm drawing in is I guess gray. That's because my drawing is on a white background, so I want them to stand out. And I'm noticing that although most of the hairs, generally speaking, around this side are going curved upwards, some are curving round like this, some are curving round like this or like this. And some like this looks like it might be going down and exactly the same as before. I don't need to necessarily get every single one of these in, but I do want to try to get a reasonable amount in until I think it looks right so I can keep building up these hairs and once I'm happy down the side, I can move onto the hairs around the bun. So in many ways I think that these are a little bit kind of easier. It just goes in a more kind of logical way, I guess. You can see the hairs going around the side here, you can see that these ones are sticking up. And then here these are just a little bit all over the place. And then there's some hairs kind of flicking around here. Now, all of those hairs on the top, I'm not necessarily going to get all of those in. There is a lot. But I do want to be building up a reasonable amount and you can see how much more realistic it looks from adding this in. So once I'm happy around the top, I can move down the side and I will add in some extra hairs around the sides as well. I'm just going to take a minute to mark in the shape of her face. So let's add a few extra hairs around here. I think around these side parts, it's just a really important area where there are a lot of flyaway hairs and there's a lot of kind of movement to the hair around here because the hair is in the wind. This is where a lot of the hair was kind of moving with that wind. So I do want to be making sure that I'm building up a lot of the hair here, but it's really just a case of building it up in exactly the same way as we have before. So you can already see what huge difference it's made adding in those flyaway hairs. What I want to do now is a final tidy up, So I've switched back to my softest pencil, now this is the 12 B pencil, and I'm just going to, for one final time, really make the darkest areas dark enough. I'm also going to tidy up some of these light hairs. If I think some of the hairs look a little bit too sort of chunky, then I can use this pencil to sort of slim them down, tidy them up, or maybe put a slight shadow underneath them if I want them to stand out a little bit more. So you can see here me just slightly adjusting and slimming down some of these lighter hairs. Just maybe making the edges a little bit softer so it doesn't start as abruptly and just adding any final tweaks. You can see me here slightly toning down this hair at either end and adding some absolute final tweaks, but then that is it. 12. Class Summary: That is the end of this course. I hope you found it helpful and I hope it's taken the mystery out of drawing hair. I do genuinely like the process. I think it's really therapeutic. So what you want to do to start with is make sure that you've got the right materials. You need a couple of different graphite pencils, in a couple of different hardnesses, and you also need the right paper. Make sure you've also got the two different types of eraser, the putty eraser and an electric eraser. And you'll need a tissue so that you can blend from there. You want to take the time to get the sketch right. So you're drawing grid and marking in all of the sections of hair. From here you can start with the hardest pencil drawing in all of the flicking motions, really focusing on the direction of the hair. And once it's all built up, you can give it a blend, then move on to the medium section, doing exactly the same process, give it a blend. And then finally, the softest pencil, adding in all of those flicks once again and blending it a final time. From there, you want to think about adding the light back in to start with using a patty eraser to gently lift some of the graphite and add those very light areas in. Then with the electric eraser to add in all of those baby hairs. Then finally want to go back to the hardest pencil, add in the baby hairs around the edge before going back to the softest pencil to add in those darkest values and really get the contrast looking as best. Now don't forget to review this class. I would love to know what you think and of course, do upload your drawings to the class resources. I'd love to see what you've drawn. Happy drawing, guys, and I'll see you in the next course.