Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey guys, my name is John and I am a freelance digital illustrator. And today I am going to be teaching you how to draw hair in a painterly style. For this class, I am going to be using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and procreate. However, any digital art illustration program should work. So if you have Photoshop or clips, Do you paint? Or GIMP, which is a free program that'll work as well. I do recommend that you familiarize yourself with the program. So if you are a beginner to digital art, this is probably not the best class for you. I recommend this for intermediate or maybe advanced levels. And without further ado, let's get started.
2. Making Hair Believable: In this first section, we're going to go over some simple ideas that make care feel more believable without needing the hair to be realistic. In I think the best way I can introduce this idea is to show you a very old piece of my art where I wasn't going for realism. But the way I drew my hair just wasn't American buidling. So the first thing that bothers me about this old drawing of mine is that the banks seem to just be floating because I'm not indicating where the hair is being incurred. You can see in my newer example that even though the hair isn't realistic, it's a lot more believable in one of the reasons is that the hair is clearly being shown to emerge from the scalp before it falls down on the person's face. The second reason is that the hair is shown deaf thickness. The hairs consistently drawn outside of where the skull would be. Whereas in my earlier sketch, the hairs basically tangent to the Skoll like it is right here. And that just doesn't make sense because even if the hair is thin, it should still have a tiny bit of thickness. But let me show you some more examples of what I mean about hair thickness. Here I drew some hair with varying levels of thickness. The thing I want you to pay attention to the most is how the hair is emerging from the skull, but either false closer or farther away from the skull to show the thickness of the hair. The last concept in this section, I'll go over his hair lines. While many times the hairline might not even be visible. Oftentimes if the hairstyle short or if the Harris being pulled back, the hairline is visible. And it helps to keep this in the back of your mind to build believability while drawing. Very, very generally speaking, I think more feminine characters will have a smoother hairline. More masculine characters will have a more angled hairline, and older characters will have a receding hairline. However, we can still see some common themes and all of them. For example, everyone has sideburns, although they vary in how far they go down the face. And everyone generally has its little bit that juts out right above the eyebrow line. If there's a technical name for that, I have no idea what it is. I did do a quick Google search, but I don't know. I'm just calling it a little bit that juts out about fibrillin. Anyway, even if it's less pronounced on some people compared to others, this is something else that all airlines haven't common. So here are some quick examples of some typical hair lines that I usually do in my characters. But of course there are really infinite variations. So feel free to use these as a reference. But even better would be for you to sketch out your own by looking at some reference photos. So to recap, here are the key points from this section. In the next section, I want to talk about how to make hair look a bit more flowy.
3. Making Hair Flowy: Next, let's talk about how to make hair flowy and not stiff. And to do this, let's look at some simple shapes. A general rule of thumb is that symmetrical shapes like this square and this triangle here, visually communicate balance and stillness. The triangle with its diagonal lines gives us a bit more action that to create the feeling of the most movement we generally want to aim for asymmetry. Okay, so let's look at some lines as well. Again, the first example here shows the least amount of movement because of the even spacing. The second example gives us a bit more action because of the diagonal lines, but the even spacing is still not as active as this last example, which shows a sense of push and pull. So how does this relate to drawing hair? Well, let's revisit the example used in the previous section again. Why does my newer art feel a bit more dynamic than the old art? While it, you can see that in my old art, the general shape of the hair is more rectangular than my newer art. In addition, the lines I used to draw the hair in my old art have that even spacing I mentioned earlier. Whereas in the newer art we have the good variation in with. Another helpful exercise is to notice those general shapes when looking at reference photos. So let's do a few of these together. Notice in this first photo how the overall shape of the hair has that asymmetry and mentioned earlier in this second photo, notice how the hair seems very dynamic and the juxtaposition of different widths. That being said, you might also intentionally keep the hair balanced, like in this example, the key is to think about what you want to convey. So let's look at another example of my old art in which I wanted to hair to be flowy by ultimately failed in some ways. While I do think these flowy ES lines help keep the hair movement, the problem is the lines are still somewhat evenly spaced. You can also see that what I tried to make the hair more dynamic than making the overall shape more diagonal. It ultimately looks symmetrical, making it unintentionally balanced. Keeping that in mind, I'm going to redraw it again in my retry and notice how the hair has a bit more asymmetry as well as a big variation and narrow and wide widths that you can see it juxtaposed against each other. Alright, the last point I want to mention is lightly, I tried to illustrate in this example how lightweight can also contribute to the shape and form of hair by giving you an example of what it looks like when there is no Langley. And here's an example of what it looks like when the line Lee is just totally random. And this is what it looks like you, when you are more intentional about your language. In general, I make lines thicker in areas that are farther away from the light, such as this part where the hair is merging from the emerging from the skeleton and thinner at the tips to emphasize how the hair tapers at the end. Here's a recap of the key points in this section. In the next video, I'll talk about some basics on rendering light and shadow wire.
4. Highlights and Shadows: Okay, now let's talk about some basics in regards to lighting and shadows. Let's look at an example again from earlier. In this picture, it seems that I am trying to create a light source that is coming from the left. The major clue being this very dark contrasts and the arm. But if that is the case, then the left side of the hair should be brighter than that right side of the hair. However, I have a pretty evenly colored and these single highlights strands of hair don't really make sense, but the lighting of style and going for making all of this luck very unintentional. So let's talk about what I could have done better in my repainting. You can see that I am both intentionally pushing parts of the hair back, then making those parts darker and also bring the hair forward and making those parts lighter. This gives the hair more believable volume and shape. This can get somewhat complex with wavy and curly hair because there are so many hills and valleys. So let's simplify the concept a bit before we complicated any further. In general, the crown of the head is a natural place where the head kind of protrudes out and we'll create a highlight ring around the head. And usually the hair that is around the neck is hidden behind other hair which creates shadow. The spot where the hair is emerging from the skull is also going to be part of the darkest areas as that is. That is what I call a valley. And the spots rarely catch any light. And as we have done previously, let's look at some examples of this in action in some photographs. So here's a model with her hair in direct sunlight, and here she is again, an indirect sunlight. You'll notice that the highlights and shadows are actually roughly in the same spot and her hair that at different intensities. For instance, there's a ring of light around the crown of her head. Like I mentioned earlier, that in the direct sunlight, the highlights or weight brighter. And in the indirect sunlight photo, the highlights are still there, but just a lot more needed. Of course, there are a lot of other textures and lighting situations that I'm glossing over. But these are the basics that I keep in mind when I am drawing from imagination. And for anything more complicated than that, I always use a reference photos and I recommend you do the same. So here are the key points from this section. We will now begin looking at some examples which I think will help you see all of these concepts put together in action.
5. Concept to Application: So in this next section of the class, I am going to be going over a bunch of different examples. I have roughly ordered them from more simple to more challenging. But that's really a matter of opinion and you might disagree, but feel free to skip around as needed if you want to follow along with me. I have posted the PSD files in the class material section. And the PST files just means that all of the layers are preserved. And most art programs, I think almost all of them should be able to open these files if you want to download them just to look at the layers, it's not going to be that helpful because I paint the hair mostly on one layer. So you're not really going to see all of the steps. You're going to have to still watch the videos. But if you want to paint along with me, you can download the file. And we can both have the same sketch layer to start with.
6. Example 1: Short straight Hair: Okay, so let me walk you through this first example. I have my reference photo on the left and I'm going to be just sketching out her face, but I'm not going to really focus on drawing the face very accurately. For just the sake of time, I'm only going to be focusing on drawing her hair. But in order to draw the hair, I do need a sketch of the skull. So that's what I'm going to do right now. Now that I have the general figure sketched out, I'm going to start sketching the hair. And what I'm looking for is just the general shape of the hair. I'm not trying to worry too much about making things beautiful or flowing just yet. We don't need to worry about individual strands right now. I'm just trying to group the hair into different sections and drawing a simplified version of where it's going to go as a rough sketch. We will definitely refine this later. So don't worry if it's looking a little clunky. And after I've blocked out the general sheep, I'm going to add in some extra lines just to indicate how the hare is going to float. And I'm going to put this layer on a low opacity, create a new layer on top to create a cleaner sketch from what I just did. I'm also trying to pay and pay attention to the role I mentioned earlier about not having like perfectly evenly spaced here. I adjusted those lines because they were a bit evenly spaced. And so I pushed one of those lines farther to the right to give them some more with variation. So now I'm using the brush pen to give the hair color on the layer below the sketch that I just made. And I just chose a random great color. I'm not trying to get the exact same color as the hair in the reference photo. I mostly just doing this demonstration and you can change, you can use the reference photo but not follow it. Follow it exactly. However, I do notice that some of the scalp is visible on the head. And this, because of that, I am going to colour in the skin a little bit just so that we can see the head poking out from underneath. Ok, so now I have started shading on top of the base layer and the line art, this is really important. We are going to start coloring. On top of the line art. I created a new layer and I have, I'm still using the brush pen. And you'll notice that the brush pen is that like maybe 60% opacity. And I am using it to block in the shadows first. And I'm not using, I'm not looking for perfect blending, so don't worry about it looking kind of rough. We wanted to just give us a sense of shape and form. And you can always change your mind a little bit, but this will give us a good start. So notice that I am leaving the ring around her head where the highlights on the beings are. And I'm not really coloring goes in and that helps bring it out. This is kinda like the hills and valleys I was talking about earlier. After I have blocked in the shadows, I'm using the color picker to select those colors that are in-between, the lightest great color and the darkest reddish color. To use the brush pen and a lower capacity to just blend those in. Instead of using this much Tool, I find that this gives the hair a little bit more interest than simply using the smudge tool, which can make things look a little bit more fuzzy and messy. So now I chose a even darker color than that red color because I feel like I didn't have a good enough range of values to go into some of the parts that should be darker than the other parts. And these are the parts that are going to be the little spaces in between the hair where there's going to be a very dark shadow because the hair is casting a shadow on the skin that's being blocked by the light. These little crevices exist a lot in the beings, but also in other places where the hair is emerging from the scalp and also in-between the crevices where the hair is next to the neck. While I'm doing this, I'm also trying to be very mindful of not, again, creating lines that are evenly spaced. And now I am using the lighter color and trying to create a hair on top of the darker colors that I've already created. This will give the hair more depth. So notice how I just used a lighter color and then use that darker colored like right next to it. And that makes it seem like one single hair is kinda like popping out. And that gives the hair a lot more dimension and form. Here I blending the back of the head in a little bit more because I notice that it's got someone that even spacing of the lines. And I think I just want the back of the hair to be more uniform and smooth compared to how I did the thing. Just to make it a bit more of a contrast. I am just about done now, so I'm just adding some finishing touches and blending a little bit better using the brush pen. But this is pretty much done. You can spend as much time as you want on this last step. But I think I'm okay with how the sins and here is my version of his hair.
7. Example 2: Braid: In this section, I will show you how I rendered braids. In my example, I'm only using two colors to start out with. I'm using a light yellow color for the base color and a darker red color for the sketch. I've created a new layer on top of the base color and sketch layer to start painting in the shutters. I'm using the brush pen on a dark red color at a very low opacity to block in the shadows. You'll see that when I do this, it creates this kind of minor, almost pinkish color when it mixes with the yellow. And now I'm going to select this color and repeat the process. This is how I blend the colors rather than using the sludge tool. And it's going to give it a more painterly effect. To render the bread. I start out by painting in the darker shadows to show each section of the braid. The darkest parts will be where the therapies is intersect. You can think of that as the valley. And then I'm going to use a light yellow color at full capacity to draw on top of these darker rendered pieces to give the hair want lightness and depth. To blend the colors a little bit more. I'm doing two things. One, I'm going to be selecting the colors that are in-between, two of the colors that I want to blend and using that to color it in a little bit more. And to selecting the lighter yellow color and drawing long thin strokes just to emphasize a couple of these individual strands of hair, but not overdoing it, just highlighting a few strands here and there. I also notice that the yellow highlights I drew earlier in on top of the bread to bring those sections out are popping up too much. So I'm adding another shadow in the Valley of the braid to push it back in. And now we really get that sense that the braid is being pulled into the hairs, being pulled into the braid and then emerging from it. At this point, I'm doing more of the same type of rendering where I use a larger sized brush pen at very low capacity to blend the colors. And I'm also using a 6B pencil brush to draw in some individual strands to add those smaller details. I like using the 6B pencil brush for adding the small details because it gives the hair a bit more texture. And so I'm going to be color picking again from the various shades that are in the hair, such as this light yellow color and the light pinkish reddish color and some of the darker red colors. And using the 6B pencil brush and all of those just to give a few hair strands and making the hair feel more like, well, here. Next I'm going to select the background color, which in this case as white. And I'm just going to paint around the hair and clean up some of those edges. And finally, I'm going to touch up this pony tail section of the braid. I'm just trying to create layers by making sure that what I perceive as the hair on the bottom is darker than what the hare is on the top. I'm also painting over any of the sketches that I might that might still be poking through if it doesn't make sense with where I want the darkest colors to be. In general, I'm making sure that the pieces that are closest to where the Harris tide, where the hair is emerging from is a bit darker and the hair that is coming out from it gradually becomes lighter. And adding a few more finishing touches. And I'm just about done here.
8. Example 3: Men's Medium Hair: This next example will be a shorter hairstyle. So again, I am going to first start out by looking at the general shape of the hair. And I'm going to just try to sketch in some very simple polygons, rather than focusing on each individual strand of hair. You'll notice that I'm using a technique in which I'm trying to exclusively use straight lines here as I'm creating the form. And I think it's a bit like sculpting where a use these lines to kind of carve out the shape that I'm looking for. Next, I'm going to be sketching on top of the general shape that I just created. And here I am going to be looking for the direction that the hair is flowing in. And I'm going to break it down into some more simple shapes again. And I noticed that there are roughly four sections. There's this bangs section that's on the front that's not fallen down on this person's Facebook kind of falling up. There's the two sections on the sides that are being combed back and then the section on the very top of his head that's being combed from the right to the left. I'm using the shale brush here that creates these nice stick to thin lines that can be found in the calligraphy section. I generally alternate between the shale brush, MBA 6B pencil brush for when I do miss sketches, I can't really say when I use which one. It's kind of just up to my whim at the time. My process from here on out is fairly similar to what I have done before. I am looking for the hills and the valleys to determine where the shadows and the highlights are going to go. In this case, I noticed that there is a bump in the front of the head and also on the right side of the hand. So I'm going to leave those, the base color as the highlight. And I am using.
9. Example 4: Hair Bun: In this next example, I will show you how to draw hair that is pulled back into a button. You will probably notice by now that my process is very similar to my previous examples. So in each upcoming example, I will try to point out some tips that are specific to the drawing. So in this drawing, I am using the 6B pencil brush to sketch out the hair line. And then I am focusing on dividing the hair into smaller sections, almost like dividing them into pieces of ribbon that lie on top of each other. So just to reiterate the process, again, I am using the brush pen on a layer above the layer that I sketched on and the layer that I colored, the solid brown colour. And I am using the brush pen to do most of my blending. And to do the blending, I vary between having it at a low opacity and a higher capacity, depending on if I want the color that I chose to be as dark as possible or not. At some point, I notice that the darkest color that I have, which is the color that I chose for this sketch. It's not dark enough, so I color Select the sketch color interests and even darker, reddish, brownish color from there. And use that to colour in some other crevices and to create a bit more definition in that dark spot on the left side of that. As for determining where the highlights and shadows are, I noticed that there is a light source and the reference that is coming mostly from the right-hand side. I can tell that it's coming from the right hand side because the left side of the teal background is darker than the right side. However, this can't be the only light source because the rest of the figure is also fairly well licked. So there must be a light source coming from the direction of the camera as well. Which explains why the highlights on the bun are facing the camera rather than being rather than on the right side. So as I am rendering this, I will be leaving highlights around the bump of pair that is created when the hair is pulled back, as well as the bump from the hairpin. Again, I'm looking for hills and valleys. That left side of the head is more in shadow. So I will leave that to be a little bit less detailed. And when I draw those individual strands for detailing, I'm going to do those in the parts where there is a bit lighter because the sections of air are not so clearly defined here. I am going to make some of it up following the rules I mentioned earlier of trying to keep the hair flowy by creating a good variation of hair pieces. I do femur finishing touches with the 6P pencil to add some individual hair strands. And here's the final product.
10. Example 5: African Braids: In this next example, I will show you how I draw a braided hair style. First. Just like every other hairstyle, I look for the way that the hair is divided into sections and I sketch toes out. So I have roughly divided the hair into three sections. The hair that is falling to the left side of her face, the hair that is being pulled back, and also the hair that is on the right side of her face going down her back. Dividing the hair into these three sections will make drawing the hair a lot more manageable. Next, I am using a very dark gray, almost black, but not quite black color to shade in the shadows, as well as parts of the hair from where the plates are emerging. I am using the brush pen and a low opacity to do this so that it blends well. Also to make the hairline less harsh, I used the brown skin color and a low capacity to make the hairline planned in a little bit. You'll notice that because her hair's fairly mat and that the lighting situation here is fairly even, meaning that she's fairly well lit all around and there isn't a single strong light source. The shadows and highlights were coined to be paying attention to have more to do with defining her features like her braids, and not necessarily conveying a very strong lighting situation. Next, I will use a lighter gray to draw on the small highlights of the braid. To do this, I'm using the brush pen on a smaller size, simply making diagonal lines along the braids. I'm trying to curve them a little bit to show that the grades are cylindrical and not slacked. And decided to add this extra braid because it felt like it was missing some things and some wasn't drawing in that hand. You'll notice that extra rate that I'm making is a lighter gray and the others, what are you trying to do is also kid T portrait a bit more atmospheric perspective and giving the overall trying more depth. A second way of rendering the braid is to draw it, receives the dark color and to render the surrounding pilots instead of drawing the highlights on top. Earlier, we had looked the hairline and a gradient between the prominent dark gray color. So to add some details to your hair, I'm now going to use the brush pen and very, very lightly draw in some of the details that I see on the reference photo. On top of this, blended in hairline area. Just a few strokes will be enough to suggest the airline style. As I rendering the braids, I noticed that I am running into the issue of her hair singing a bit stiff because of the rule I mentioned earlier about even spacey. You'll notice that the hair on her back in my drawing is all very neatly lying in a row. So to break this up a bit, I'm going to paint a braid on top of this section of the hair in a somewhat diagonal direction. I don't really like how the overall shape of her head is right now. So I'm taking in the white color and just going to repaint the outside a little bit. From here on out, I'm going back and forth using a combination of the three techniques I've mentioned for PT in the braids. So the first technique that I mentioned was adding little diagonal lines of highlights. The second technique was to use a darker color to draw in the stripes instead of using the highlights. And the last technique is to add layers of hair by trying a darker piece above the existing hair. And then rendering that act. As i am rendering the braids. I'm also trying to pay attention to their uniformity. As an adult. Want them to be too uniform. I don't want it to look so perfect. So I am using a smaller brush to make some pieces smaller and some pieces larger. So I am applying that same rule of not making everything evenly spaced, even the, even in the small details. And at this point, you could likely keep on going forever with adding details and rendering. But I like to stop fair that early on, leaving some other hair unfinished for a more painterly look. I'm pretty happy with how this looks now. So I've been struck here and let's move on to the next example.
11. Example 6: Natural Afro : In this example, I will be demonstrating how I approach drawing natural afro hair. The important thing to keep in mind here is to create depth, volume, and texture so that the hair doesn't look flat. So the first thing that I do is sketch out my general shape. And notice that I exaggerate some other lines that I see and I didn't just draw circle. I find that in general, using straight lines to form round forms rather than using curved lines will force you to create more interesting and dynamic shapes as an end result. Next, I'm going to paint in some shadows around her face where here's the reason shadows here is because their hair's falling on either side of her face past reviews. And so they hair is going to be blocking any light that would otherwise reached that side of her face. Next, I'm going to use the 16th pencil brush and a lighter brown color to start painting in some individual curls. I choose a 6B pencil brush because I like it's texture, so you don't have to use it, but any hard brush width, textural work, they also like the Shale brush in the dry brush for similar reasons. The way that I draw the individual curls is to make small parallel strokes next to each other rather than drawing a loopy line. The reason I do this is because I find that it better captures a curl as seen from the side. When you draw a loopy line, the part of the curl that is farther away from the viewer is the same color or value as the part of the curlies closer to the viewer, Mickey and visually flat. So if you think across as cylinders, think of the little strokes that I'm drawing as bringing out the highlights on the cylinder, which would only be on one side of the cylinder, not wrapping all the way around it. Next, I'm going to go back and forth and recently the hair on the entries and then sketch them and back in which we create depth. If I don't do this, it's going to leave that solid line he sketched in earlier and I'll make the hair seen Brock solid, which is not the look that I'm going for. And the next thing I'm going to do is to give the sense that the curl is popping out of her head. So I'm going to use a dark brown color to fill in some of the tiny spaces where the scalp is exposing can kind of see the hair emerging. So this is going to give the illusion of the hair is really popping out because these dark spots are getting no light. And since there's not really a hairline. And I'm just going to look at the reference photo and notice that the hair split somewhat towards the upper left of her head. And I'm just going based off this because the direction of the curls on the left side seem to play a bit down and the right side points up and then down to the right. So I'm going to make my biggest dark spot here. And then using the darker brown, I'm going to distinguish the curl, the curls by drawing in cast shadows. So Cal shadows are created when something blocks something else from. And it's really important that we don't overdo cast shadows because it can make things look really flat if you are, if you mean to draw a cash right away and outlining all sides of the curls. So a good rule of thumb is to remember that the cache shatter should really only be in one direction unless you really know what you're doing. Should really only be on one direction, one side of the curl. Because if you start outlining the girls, this will find withdrawing in what you're doing essentially is saying that there are shadows on both sides of that curl, which doesn't really make sense. So again, to reiterate, the dark parts should only be sketched in at the parts closest to the scalp and where one might be casting a shadow. And then it's okay to just give a suggestion of the curls. You don't need to clearly define every single one of them. I like to choose a few to give some more attention to and then leave the rest kind of messy. As I finish up refining this, notice that I'm leaving the bottom part of her hair, her cheeks fairly dark, without adding too much detail. And I'm making sure to have a greater variation of smaller strokes on the top half of her hair, the part that is exposed to light. This also helps give them our debt because it gives the illusion that the more detailed hairs in the front and a less detailed hair is further away. So here is my finished version.
12. Example 7: Wavy Hair: In this next example, I'm going to show you how I approached drawing big, wavy hair. In my sketch. I try to block out the biggest chunks of hair and I also shade on the underside of the hair that is not getting any light because it looks like there's a strong highlight on the upper left side of her head that tells me that's where the light source is coming from. And you'll notice that a lot of the shadows tend to be on the right side. For instance, the hair that's on the left is creating cast shadows onto her face. And then her face is creating a cache shadow to her hair on the right side. And then the hair on the right side of her face is going to be just a bit darker than the hair that's on the left. So I don't really like the color that I chose for sketching out her hair. But there's a couple of things that I can do to change and unrest experiment with this. So the first thing is to just simply change the color. And you can do this very easily by putting the layer on alpha lock, selecting the color that you want, and then pressing fill layer. This is if I know exactly what I want to change the color to, but if I don't know what color I want to change it to symptoms. I'll play around with the layer modes just to see what happens. Anyway, I end up making the hair a lighter reddish brown color because I think this brings out the richness of the yellow ish, orangeish hair color that I choose. So after I've changed the sketch color, I am now going to paint in the shadows on top of all of my leaders. I am using the brush pen on a medium ish opacity to block in most of the shadows. And here I am looking for where the hair kind of curves down. I'm just roughly blocking in those areas. But depending on how deep the valley goes or how close or far away it is from the light source, I might make the shadow a bit darker or lighter. So remember that we discussed that the light source is in the upper left part of the frame. So I'm parts that are directly blocked by that light source or parts that are farther away will be a bit darker in shadow. After I do the shadows, I'm going to want to make the lighter parts and the darker parts blend up bit better together. There are two ways that I achieve this. So the first way is that I am creating a gradient by using the brush pen at a very low opacity, meaning that it's more transparent. And I am using the color picker to select the darker and lighter color to create the in-between colors so that it is gradually going from light to dark. The reason I do this instead of using an air brush is because I think it gives it a more painterly effect. Because this is how you would do it if you were actually painting it. The second thing that I do is that I use the brush pen this time at a smaller size and higher opacity, meaning less transparent. To create small strands that lay on top of the hair. I usually choose the lightest color that already exists in the hair so that it looks like it's emerging from the hair. And you can really see it overlap on top of the darker pieces. It's important not to overdo this. I usually only paint these smaller strands towards the front of the person's face so that I can create a sense of depth. Because when you are creating a hair on top, you're overlapping it, creating a sense of front and back, hence the depth. So speaking of creating a sense of depth, I'm now going to be using the darker brown colour to colour in between the strands of curls up the bottle. This is going to make it seem like the hair is resting in front of the hair that is in the shadow. So these dark pieces are peeking through the hair that isn't the friend. If the hair was a totally solid object, you wouldn't see these dark pieces in the back. But just to show that the hair is more permeable, we will see these dark hairs in the background. That's also why I'm drawing these more closely to her neck than at the edges of the hair because the edges of the hair have more light. So again, I am going back and forth batik, between these three steps. One, using low opacity to blend and create gradients. Two, using high opacity to create strands of hair on top. And three, Paying attention to adding dark spots where there might be cast shadows to show overlap. You could honestly do these three steps forever. There's not really a good time to stop. So it's kind of up to your own artistic tastes as to when you think you are done with the painting. As for me, this is good enough. So I am going to stop here.
13. Example 8: No Reference : So in my last example, I'm not going to draw from reference. I'm just going to show you how I apply all of the things that we talked about to drawing from imagination. I'm going to start by drawing my figure, but I'm going to draw them bold so I can see where the hair is coming from. And for this example, I'm going to try to make the hair looks like it's flowing in the wind. And when I'm sketching it out, I'm just going to draw some very loose flowing lines and I will clean it up later. So one of the things that I'm keeping in mind is trying to make the triangle shape. So as I'm sketching out the fluffiness of the hair, I'm trying to make sure that it's a dynamic triangle. And to avoid symmetry, again, symmetry is not bad. It's just not what I am going for. Adding in a few more gesture lines trying to see which ones look good. So one thing that I do is on my first rough sketch, I will draw more lines than is necessary just to see if I end up with one that looks good and I end up erasing the ones that I don't like. And then I'll do a bit of a cleaner sketch on top. After I've done these rough lines, again, picking and choosing which lines that I liked the best. I find that I'm not spending too much time on the initial sketch helps keep it a bit loose and more flowy, and also just saves you time. I'm an impatient person, so that's important to me. That making long strokes that aren't too good is really important for making sure that your hair feels flowy. So now as I think about coloring in the hair, I'm going to put this figure kind of in a just regular daylight setting. So those errors that I'm drawing are just to indicate where the light is going to be hitting the hare, which is kind of all over the maybe with an emphasis on the left. And since I'm drawing was from imagination, I can really make the hair whatever color I want. So I just took chose TO Because, you know, tools, fun or something that I'd like to do is to make my sketch a darker, darkish, reddish, brownish color and put the setting on either Color Burn or Linear Burn depending on the colors that I chose below it. And what it does is it creates some pretty cool line art colors just automatically. And then I start painting on top. So in this next phase of painting and going to be doing a lot of the steps that we've talked about, but kind of out of order, I'm going back and forth and moving around the piece just to Make it feel a bit more cohesive. But I am going to be starting with the brush pen, a fairly transparent opacity and blocking in the shadows. I am loosely leaving a crown of light around the crown on her head. And I'm also going to be trying to create a sense of depth by creating over-lapping components. So for instance, I really want to give the sense that there is hair flowing away from the viewer. So those hair strands in the back, I'm going to paint a little bit less saturated so that it seems farther in the distance. And I'm also going to paint hair on top to create hair pieces that are in the front. I'm going to be making a hair strand in front of the face. For instance, I'm going to it's going to take me a few tries to get it right, but there will be a herpes in the front of her face. Also to make sure that the hair doesn't seem just like one solid piece. I am going to try to make sure that I have a good variety of sections. And these, I might have one big section, but juxtaposed to that, I'm going to have some smaller strands. So like I mentioned previously, you want to make sure that you don't have equal distribution are equal spacing because that can really make your piece look really static. Here I'm selecting some of the colors in between to just blend in a gradient in the transition between the highlights and the shadows. And you'll notice that I changed my mind a lot. When I start painting. I don't automatically know exactly what I want it to look like. You can think of it maybe more as carving. So I am starting off with a rough shape and then carving in the details to create the shape that I ultimately want. And the great thing about digital art is you can just really experiment. Make a bolt stroke. And if you don't like it, you can always undo it very easily. So I circled that bit because you'll notice that the, those five strands of hair are now very evenly spaced. So I'm going to purposefully erase some of it so I don't have that effect. Yeah, that's a bit better. Another thing that I like to do is to use whatever background color, in this case white to start carving out some of the edges. I find that when I do that it really helps make the drawing feel a part of the canvas if that makes any sense. And it also creates steps because the parts that get covered up in white a little bit kind of look like it's in the distance. So I notice another spot of even spacing the I'm going to try to get rid of. So another trick is to select a section of the hair and then use the warp tool to really exaggerate some of the lines that you might already have going on, which is what I'm doing here because I was noticing that it was a little bit flat. And I wanted the feeling of there to be a bit more dynamics or really stretched out that piece that's going out on the side. And with that, I do a couple more finishing touches and I am just about done.
14. Closing Thoughts: Thanks so much for taking my class. I hope you found it useful. And if you did draw along with me or if you take what you learned from this class and draw something else, I would love to see you post it in the class projects. The purpose of making art, in my opinion, is to share it. So I would love to see what you make if you still have questions about something that I explained in the class that wasn't as clear as it could be. Please share it in the discussion and I will promptly reply. I usually reply within one or two days of someone posting. And if you thought this class was helpful, please give it a review. And if you want to see more classes for me, please be sure to follow me on skill share so that you can be notified when I post my next class. Thanks again, and I will see you next time.
Yannan Shi, Digital Illustrator
