FINALLY that hair "tutorial" you've all been asking for

okay hello and yes it's finally here for the video you have been asking me for and pretty much every video I post nobody I'm really reluctant to call this a tutorial so if / when I do put tutorial in the title I'm gonna put some hard air quotes unmet because this isn't really like how to draw hair this is just kind of how I draw hair and not only is my process always changing but also there are many ways to draw hair so don't think of this as a step-by-step how to draw hair think of this as explaining how I draw hair and also some helpful tips here and there okay sound good cool I've never really filmed any tutorial type videos before so I have no idea how this is gonna turn out so if you like it let me know and I could do more Anatomy is another one that I get asked to do a lot so give this video a thumbs up if you liked it at the end though because we haven't even started yet and I will do an Anatomy one in the future and also anything else that you might want me to do so thank you to it so I'm going to be drawing with my handy-dandy erasable pen it's gonna be kind of hard to like give you guys specific advice on drawing hair because I don't really know a lot of the problems you guys are having when you draw hair but you know I'll do my best so one thing I noticed a lot that people do with hair and I did this in the past - it's like thinking of hair is just like an entire like entity just thinking about what it is so when you think of hair you think of like all of the individual strands and like the volume and stuff like that and those things are important to keep in mind but when you're in the beginning of just like sketching out something just forget all of that for everything that you draw when you're putting down the base you should only think of it it like shapes and like what it looks like when you just break it down into the most basic form that it is so for example when you're drawing Bobby you might draw a circle and then some other stuff for the head like a triangle shape I don't know and then some more like circles down here for like shoulders and stuff it would be a lot better if I was actually drawing it but you know but you get the point you always break things down into like basic simple shapes and for some reason a lot of people forget to do that with hair because hair is should be treated like that too because that's how everything in art should be treated so we have this head here right which by the way another thing that might be throwing people off is a lot of people forget to draw this part of the head like this bump back here a lot of people just like draw a circle like right here but if you're going to draw a circle in the base like I did here be sure to extend this part of the head back because this is where the brain is and you want a brain so yeh let's say I have like hair about this length and just like in a bob ish shape with like bangs and so what would that look like okay so you would have bangs maybe coming off of the head right now I'm not thinking of specific strands or anything I'm just thinking and like shapes and it's like okay I want the hair to come out roughly around here and end around here maybe there's some leg strands or something peeking out another important thing to keep in mind is where the hair is coming out and so this person has hair parted about like right here so if we look so this is where the hair is parted at this point I don't need to do this because it I just think of it whenever I'm working but if it'll help you out draw a line where the hair is parted like that then that way you can remember like this is where the hair is coming out so when you get into like the details later you know that this right here is where it all begins so here we have like a basic shape of the hair right you could even go more simple than this like you know how before I just this was literally just like a square yeah break it down as simple as you need it to and just be very very loose because a lot of people focus on specific chunks and specific strands too easily and then that's what makes you lose this like flow enos and is what makes you come out a lot more stiff with your art because the more you focus on small details you don't really focus on what it all looks overall and so then you can say is this fluffy enough is there enough volume is if the length that I want can I easily divide this into smaller chunks which you can see I kind of already started doing here with like this and stuff and so then this way I can bend it okay oh maybe it's two floofy over here because maybe the character needs to have more thin straight hair or you can be like it's not poofy enough or I should try out this different style and doing this helps you really just focus on the silhouette and then like the mass and volume of the hair instead of focusing right away and can I make this look like hair once you get this like basic shape down then you can start going in and adding more chunks like I was saying earlier I kind of already started doing that because since I have drawn hair a lot I have hair something that I'd really focused on in the past I don't really need to do this step-by-step anymore but I would recommend starting off in the most basic shapes that you can and then you can start picking out which parts are like it's own separate chunks and which parts are like individual strands it's like I always add these little hair things in my art don't even know what those are supposed to be another thing that you should definitely keep in mind is like hair is pretty like unpredictable it's like this chunk like right here instead of making it just this flat shape like that I'm gonna make it like a little bit more like curved and there's like a bump in here I'm just pen is dying dear Lord well this is unplanned and unexpected if there's a reason for hair to be really pristine and exact then by all means go for it but if you're just drawing like regular average everyday person odds are they go they aren't going to have like perfect smooth sleek hair with like no strands pop or anything I used to add more individual strands like this and stuff I don't really do it as much anymore but you definitely can yeah those are some basic things to keep in mind when you get started I'm gonna get it at the pen and tell you some other tips and tricks thought I had another black or instable pen but I don't the show must go on so I'm using this maybe blue one I don't think anyone cares the next thing I want to touch on is like remembering the different parts of hair if that makes any sense the probably doesn't make sense right now but just trust me when you're thinking of like different parts I do it in one of two ways I'll always have the bangs because most of my characters have bangs cuz you know and so there will be the bangs like right here and then there can either be a spot here and then on the other side or there can be a spot here on top and then here on the bottom and so this would be one chunk right here right this is one part let's say this porridge one is one section we can add a second section let's say she has her hair up in like a half ponytail so this top part can be section number two and then we can have hair at the bottom here which would be section number three you'll notice that when I was sketching this so I kind of kept to the same rule that I kept over here where I'm blocking things and kind of more basic shapes first and not really focusing on like the specific details I suddenly lost all words in my vocabulary instead of like going in in destroying to style it perfectly I was thinking how is the hair sectioned off there's the bangs and then the top part and then the bottom part and this can work with pretty much any hairstyle let's say we keep the same like idea for hairstyle again so we'll have chunk one but then this time let's say it's right here and right here kind of similar to the first one so we will have this like front part which would be part one and then we could have parts right here which can be part two so we have this then these would both be part two because even though they're still like their own individual pieces they're like the same on either side like there are symmetrical pieces I don't know if that makes any sense but and then we could even go like another step further and say she has like her third part back here instead of like right here where there's one in the front and then one on top and then one on the side there is one on top and then there are two two on the sides and then one in the back instead of it being your like front top bottom it's like front middle back okay Zola yo what's up it's all over from the future one thing that I forgot to mention when I was talking about these different hair sections pretty much any hairstyle can be divided into sections but if you are a beginner I would recommend trying to keep that to like three sections if you can like try not to go over three you can use as many different sections as you want and create really crazy hairstyles but again if you are still new to this I would recommend keeping it to as little sections as possible just to make it easier for yourself and then once you start getting used to drawing hair a little bit more you can add more sections and get really crazy and make that insane anime hair alright back to the video so the things we have been going over so far are more of things to keep in mind and put into practice when you're beginning drawing so now I'm going to kind of talk about when to add like more details into the hair my dog is licking my big for this I'm gonna start focusing on just one specific chunk so let's look at this hairstyle let's say we have this chunk right here now this looks really really flat and that can definitely work for like some drawings but a lot of the time hair isn't just sitting they're like straight it can be like twist and turned it could be blowing in the wind it could be doing a whole bunch of stuff and while this could definitely work sometimes it's really important to know how to draw hair and a little bit more of a dynamic way so let's say we have this chunk of hair this can definitely work but if you want there to be more movement in your hair erase that when you have a hair chunk like this a lot of people tend to forget that there are two sides to it and I think that a good way to think of it is like a ribbon so if we have this as a ribbon it can like turn inside out like this and it's like you would see the top part here and then the bottom part you would see the inside so the top has the outside the bottom has the inside when you draw hair like this instead of just flat and simple like this it just makes the drawing seem so much more lively so you don't have any examples so you notice a lot of the times when I draw hair this is something that I do very very often so huge the top and then here's the inside and then here's the top and then here's the inside pretty much every drawing of hair I have is like that you can see multiple different parts of the hair because it just makes it seem so much more like lively in that the person is actually doing something and that that person is like living in a world with an environment around them and another thing that you'll probably notice is that like even then when I am doing this more like dynamic hair pose whatever you'll notice that when I'm drawing hair in this more dynamic way I'm still keeping to the same principle of sketch out basic shapes first and to be very loose and you'll notice I'm not just drawing like one line and then another line and then another line because then it can come off as a lot more stiff so now it comes to the part where you want to add more detail to it because this doesn't look like hair the way hair works is like let's say this is the part well it is the part that's coming out of the head so there's going to be a lot more strands on here and a lot more gathered here and then when it gets down there's going to be less and less because this is where the hair starting to like spread out and move away from each other and just kind of do its own thing and then at the bottom there will be more lines and strands again because this is where the chunks of the hair are starting to like group although there's going to be less down here than there is up here appears where there's going to be more like shading and strands and all that fun stuff because this is where all of the hairs courses together I just dropped my pen this part that like twists around I always like making this strand the finished strand you don't have to do that but that's just how I like to do things so I'll do this I'll maybe even add like a little section in here so if I was coloring in this strand of hair this part right here wouldn't be colored in because that's just like a gap some thing you can do is like fully connect this line and make that its own separated strand and that would look fine I personally don't like to do that I always like to kind of separate my strands like in like my chunks halfway through about maybe a little bit more just cuz I feel like it makes it look more like a cohesive chunk of hair and then at this point you just think about how separated the hair would be and still like down here since it's flying out oh god Florida weather at this point like down here the hair is going to be more separated and so that would be maybe like a bigger chunk and then a tinier chunk and then another wittle thing and this part is really just like trial and error and figuring out what looks good and just kind of thinking about the way the hair is and your drawing and then just applying this knowledge to that then you can start adding more individual strands the way I do that is by just drawing lines inside like I said earlier zola anyways as I was saying you can add lines that extend out of it I used to do that but I don't really do that anymore just because I don't think it really works with my style if you want to make them almost like tiny little hair and if you're a digital artist or like painting one thing that you can do is paint those so them that way they're like on top of every actually think I have an example so you'll notice here like the most part I was keeping the same general rules but then for these smaller strands of hair I just painted them straight in with the color and there's no like line art or anything on there that can definitely help add a lot of depth to you would just add like basic shading and stuff which I'll go over in a minute but first after wait for Florida to get its together and stop being rainy okay so I a might be thinking to yourself over that's fine and dandy can you use that on a person yes you can it's done many times okay so if we draw a human as I tend to do really you use this same information here but then apply it to a human head it's really pretty easy once you've practiced it and kind of experience drawing this isn't a descendant isn't going anywhere will draw the same way we did here but on a human head crazy I know right another little tip is that a lot of people tend to draw hair directly like against the head which is fine like it's all fine and dandy like you can do that every now and again I do that but I can definitely recommend instead of drawing it directly on the hair you see like this top part of wait can i zoom in haha this part of the hair right here instead of drying it like flat like this just add a little bit and like if this is the hairline just draw it going up and then down a little bit once you take everything that I've said into consideration this part can be pretty easy definitely takes a little bit of practice and knowing when to do what there's one of those things where I feel like a lot of people just overthink it and they don't like really sit down and like think about it you know they just are like okay well this is hard so let's just say it's hard and then fail at it when I do not finished illustration of the person a lot of details end up going into like the colouring stage because there's only so many details you can add in a sketch in a line art when it comes to hair without it looking really like not really stiff I'm not quite sure what the word I'm looking for is but you can just get a lot more depth and make your hair just look a lot more convincing if you save some of the details for like the coloring fades obviously like highlights and shading and stuff but also like creating individual strands and stuff like that a lot of that just comes off it's a lot more real feeling with hair if you just save it for the coloring phase and I sketched this head off camera because I just feel like I would be repeating myself if I showed the process and also this totally is in here because I messed up and I'm trying to hide the mistake nope not at all when you are coloring hair I would really recommend starting off with a mid-tone and honestly wouldn't your coloring anything I would suggest starting off with a mid-tone just because it makes it easier for blending and stuff just keep in mind wear shades and highlights are going to be speaking of where on the hair would the shading and highlights me it definitely depends on like hair style and hair texture and like though what's it called the light source I'm smart it all depends on that sort of stuff but as a general rule of thumb just whatever anything is like proofing out or close together if that makes any sense so like if we're looking at this hair there would probably be a little bit of highlights up here but then a lot of highlights down in here because this part is high up so if we assume that there's just basic light source of like a Sun right here coming down into this I can't really draw up so it's going off the paper the light would be hitting this part because it's higher up and then this part because it's sticking out and there wouldn't really be as much in here because this part is curving in so if you some markers I would recommend feathering it out like this or another thing that you can do is add something like that how you add shades and highlights really depends on your art style I like to do the combination of both this feathery thing and this like harsh line I would also recommend following the curve of the hairs and then that way any streakiness can just come off as like you know it's hair and then for something like this like down here I would do just feathery overall because if you look at the top it's like there's like in theory like a circle underneath here which is your head and so it's like it's kind of wrapping around that shape up here whereas down here it's a lot more free-flowing and so there's less structure to it then I take a lighter color and then just blend that out or blonde it crazy it's a completely different color like this pink and then when we add like I said earlier there would be a lot of shading and stuff up here because this is where hair is really close together then there would also be shading down here and then this is also where I would start adding like more depth and like individual strands I don't like drawing individual strands as like each line like I said before I'll sometimes do that here and there but for the most part to make it seem more believable I'll just add like different like shades of this isn't making any sense let me just show you I would usually just like add lines like this and it would like and give the illusion that there's like thinner strands in there and then once you start lighter you can also go in with some darker colors and blend it out how much of this you do really depends on your style and what you enjoy doing like if you have a very line art heavy style you wouldn't have to add as many of this like shading detail and stuff when you color you have a very liner with style I would recommend adding more shading details and highlight details so then that way it can kind of give off the effect that it is in fact hair yeah no look at this you're doing hair way to go look at you champion yeah as you're shading just remember the stuff that you already know about like light sources and whatnot since this part is very loose and not really wrapping around the new thing I would go back to that like feather highlight blending thing which is just like instead of going like this all the way through you would go like this and then when you get to the end just like full gait and then you get that feathering effect in places like this I wouldn't really add any highlights because this part is turned inward and if you remember what I was talking about over here I turned that outward and if you want to make it turn inward there you go you literally just do the opposite of how I do that add more shading here and this is a timer I would do feather for the shading too so the same way that I showed you to do highlights code do that exact same thing here if you are a beginner or you just don't practice hair all that much and you want to practice it a little bit more I would recommend this sort of hairstyle slash hair texture things open because it's easier to draw and I feel like hair is a little bit notorious in the art community for different textures being difficult to draw especially like curly hair and stuff a lot of people find that difficult and it is more difficult but I would recommend starting here and then once you do start drawing different hair textures you'll actually find that it's a lot of the same techniques just applied in different ways so let's say we're drawing a character who has like really curly hair let me think of the curly hair again just think of it as basic shapes first a hair will probably be poufier and more wavy and stuff and it's going to be really messy but you want it to be messy in the beginning because the more messy a more loose it'll be and then you can just touch it up later Yesi like here again it's general shape and then we can start going in and thinking of like different chunks so maybe there's like other chunks here then maybe each side has two bigger chunks fast and rush but you get my point it doesn't matter what hairstyle or hair texture I'm drawing it's all just the same rules you just use them in different ways so like for this curly hair for example it's still basic shapes and drawing different sides of hairs and adding volume and thinking of sections it's just different like since the hair is curlier and bigger there will be more sections and you will see more sides of the hair because the hair is turning in different ways and lastly the biggest tip I can give to you guys after watching this video hair might still give you trouble and that's perfectly fine watching a hair tutorial on YouTube isn't going to fix all of your hair problems it's just going to put ideas into your brain but you can't actually physically improve on drawing hair unless you practice sure a video can help but it's only by drawing hair over and over and over again that you can really truly get better at it so if you're still having a hard time drawing hair after this video please don't get discouraged it's the only way to get better with artist practice so that's biggest piece of advice that I could give to you man all of that being said I hope that this was helpful to you again I haven't really done this sort of quote-unquote tutorial type video before so I don't really know what I'm doing I'm not really good at speaking on my channel if you want I'm not really good at speaking if if you watch my channel you know I'm not very good at speaking so I hope I explained things well enough if you still have questions let me know in the comment section down below and I will try my best to answer them thank you for watching and give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and let me know if you want me to do more of these tutorial style ish videos I know a lot of people want me to make one about Anatomy so let me know if you're interested in that and also comment down below any other tutorials you want me to make and I will make it if you guys want me to and if you aren't subscribed consider subscribing because I make a new video every single week it's mostly art videos but every now and again I'll just post whatever I feel like posting and if you want to follow me on any of my social media they will be on screen now as well as linked in the description below I'm most active on Instagram so if you have an Instagram I would highly recommend following me over there because that is where I'll be most likely posting my art and giving updates on YouTube videos and all that sort of fun stuff and there's a video on screen now and in the AI cartridge check out if you want please I would really appreciate it thanks for watching and I hope you found this helpful and I will see you next week goodbye

Channel: Oliver's Antics

Views: 59,092

Rating: 4.9829679 out of 5

Keywords: art, artist, drawing, sketchbook, illustration, hair, tutorial, hair tutorial, how to draw hair

Id: CFR0ZJaNGmQ

Length: 25min 43sec (1543 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019