How To Draw and Design Hair for Characters

you know the dictionary defines hair as the invisible gaseous substance surrounding the earth a mixture mainly of oxygen and nitrogen so it's really true that wherever we look hair is all around us who put in conjunction with a video and discipline like our clothing video from two months ago hair is a non-structural feature of human and humanoid characters it's a source of storytelling and self-expression for characters and it's also a little bit of a process to learn how to draw well a lot of you have asked in comments recently too about ways to make recognizable or new novel hairstyles so we'll look into that as well the biggest element of hair to understand is shape not just using a spray or gel to shape it but to think of the shape of hair first this might be counter to what we're used to hair individually is usually long strands what's the easiest way to represent that with a straight or curly line therefore use lines to draw hair but for a couple of reasons it's much easier to think of both the overall shape and the individual segments of hair as shapes part of the reason for this we always do this when using abstraction in design you could choose to draw every individual leaf of a tree or you could draw the overall silhouette and draw a few individual leaves for texture we now grasp that this is a tree we could draw a plain wall and then add a few bricks to indicate that this wall is made of brick now we understand the texture hair can be defined with overall shapes smaller shapes and then texture if we want to go further we can add detail to bring a more realistic render to the hair but with shapes the hair is easily recreatable from different angles redrawable and easy to move or animate we'll go further on this but remember this workflow of broad to specific not individual strands or choosing that hair brush in a digital painting app and using that first as for hair itself it's important to remember the different kinds of hair that range from thin to thick from straight to wavy or curly to coiled it's also important to think of how oily hair is which leads to tensile strength it's gloss it's luster and things like that depending on how much hair there is or how gray or white the hair is this is a great place to educate ourselves because outside of wigs and the ultra stylized anime hair that sort of defies all kinds of laws of physics it's helpful to think about how your character's hair would realistically act in the real world asian hair for instance in complete generalities is relatively straight thick and tough because it has a larger diameter than the majority of other hair european hair might be a light tone like blonde brown or red relatively thin and straight or wavy black hair coils at a higher frequency than most other hair all of these qualities affect how a character might wear their hair how they might style their hair and in a lot of cases the cultural significance and role that hair plays in people's lives think of the pride that the polynesian peoples have for hair that's showcased in moana the ease with which it's taken down or tied up i'd say especially when designing hairstyles for black characters and especially women take a moment to get an understanding for just how much work goes in to styling and maintenance i wish i could refine a thread from a few years ago that was incredibly informative on the subject the time and maintenance needed for most styles alone which this kind of goes for any character might mean that their lifestyle makes a certain hairstyle unrealistic even something like a nicely kept afro or braids might be unrealistic in a post-apocalyptic setting for instance now since much of this maintenance is done much easier with another person or groups of people helping you it contributes to communal value and importance centered around hair care it's research well spent to give some authenticity to your characters a lot of times people just like to use the same hair for everyone and it's nowhere near as powerful and likely makes people that the character represents not feel as representative and bounce it off of friends that have the same background like does this track does this honestly feel right and how can i improve by the way this chart that i'm using is helpful but it's not really standardized and of course because these things are genetic traits there are plenty of opportunities for a recessive gene to come up or to have a blend of hair types so just because something may be more rare doesn't mean it doesn't exist just like eye color it's not like because you have a certain background you are automatically guaranteed to have a certain kind of hair this is just a range i know that for me i've like styled my hair and and gotten haircuts my whole life thinking that it's like completely straight hair but it's actually kind of wavy to curly and so you know i comb it down after it's wet but then as eventually as it dries it starts to curl back together i'd like to like you know find a way to go truer to that wavy hair i've not really had the the right barber i've asked before and they're like oh yeah and they just do the like the fingers like yeah you just kind of it doesn't that doesn't help when trying to think up those broad overall shapes it's helpful to think about the flow of hair this is a place where we can create appealing shapes and aid the gesture of our character in some cases on a bald head you have a front a back and a backpack that's the that's the technical term and of course you have each side you can part hair in the middle or on one of the sides and instantly create two separate shapes to separate flows to the hair you can pull those shapes backward or forward depending on the length you can create much larger or even separate shapes off of the head keep in mind that again depending on the length and type of hair you will frequently find s curves shapes that are balancing out the weight going back and forth even in straight hair that's long enough sometimes one place a lot of people seem to have trouble is the place where the hair meets the forehead or anywhere on the border of the head here is where it helps to create both a line on the head itself as well as a shape that's extending off of the head a segment the shape that this makes can be a straight line a wavy one a widow's peak which comes to a point or a receding male pattern baldness bangs or another portion of the hair can hang down and usually this little wavy shape meets the ears either clean cut or with sideburns from the area in front of the ear everything in between is our chia pet to manicure remember that it's so important though to treat the place where the hair intersects with the head as a separate shape this is something that has its own volume we can get a really flat read or break our dimension if we aren't careful sometimes it looks like the hair is drawn onto the head sort of like okoye has those those tattoos of hair on her head it's cool but not what you want if you're trying to draw hair once we get our hair fundamentals down and practice the basic ways that simple hairstyles in everyday life look we can start to get more stylized and even add some subtle hints about our character's design and the silhouette to their hair maybe braids or dreadlocks or clips or ties add dimension and create commas of sorts a break in one shape and the start of another with more intricate patterns remember our abstraction we don't need to draw every little detail of a braid for instance just use overall shape and then indicate with a little bit of texture and while we're making a lot of styles on this sort of neutral mannequin head for the purpose of instruction don't be afraid to really vary the head shape and size and allow the shape of the hair to be an extension of those interesting head shapes and body shapes if your character will be acting or moving in a comic or animation see if there's room for the hair to move around and if a change in design could make for more interesting motion or follow through of the motion feel free to abstract or stylize ever so slightly a character like mrs incredible seems to have a fairly regular set of hair but there's sort of an iconographic flat shape that her hair makes in silhouette which swoops up asymmetrically in the back this design started with a paper cutout that was fleshed out into three dimensions really starting with a simple shape that you slowly flesh out into something that believably belongs on someone's head reverse engineering a cool shape can be a great way to get some interesting concepts down here i'm just kind of aimlessly concepting without purpose but when you do have purpose and character design aiming to fit their personality and the like that goes a whole lot farther and if you are looking to make hair look a bit more detailed once we have our big shapes and little shapes think about the way that light is hitting this hair oftentimes a bit of a halo or rim light occurs right on the sides of the head this is also where the hair is sometimes more tightly packed together instead of making those individual lines think about cutting negative space shapes into our smaller detail shapes to show the texture and individual strands of the hair we've touched on the element of self-expression but the hair can say a lot about our characters unkempt to show a chaotic and scatter-brained energy tight or slicked back for someone controlling or even domineering this video is obviously about the hairstyles that we put on human characters but hair and fur is also a part of animal creatures and we can use a lot of the same principles i've always had a little bit of a personal pet peeve with animal characters that look like they're wearing a wig almost like bugs bunny in disguise i can't speak for everyone i just think it makes a bit more sense when the hair seems like it originated from the creature that it's on unless it's supposed to be like a wig like the rabid peach that isn't exactly the peak of character design itself especially when the male characters have seemingly realistic hair but then the female characters have like a blonde human wig for some reason here's a bit of progress i've made in iterating on a character with a few years gap in between goodwin here is a street urchin that i made a few years ago and while there's some good elements to the design the hair stands out as a real weak point in this old illustration from a rendering standpoint this hair blowing in the wind looks pretty flat and taking into account certain factors about the character despite trying to be very elite and aristocratic she's still living on the street so her hair is going to be messy from encountering grime and never being washed it's going to be greasy from never being washed it's going to be that slightly thicker type of strand of hair if we're taking her asian background into account and not as wispy and the most practical thing although maybe not the most austere from her perspective would be for it to be chopped messily and uneven like she took a dull blade to it herself and sawed it off in the more recent version of her and the trading card illustration that i finished for this month spiko's backpack it takes all those things into account and delivers a much more interesting read on the character and plays into some of the facial expressions that she's putting off too i hope these things help you to create hairstyles of your own and inspires you to really put in the practice and study of hair to improve the way that you make it like anything that study of what's real will help inform the way that you stylize and concept oh hey tell me in the comments who has your favorite hairstyles fictional or otherwise and who do you think has the most iconic hair you can get bitco's backpack over on patreon.com bagel denizen it's new original art in your mailbox every month a hard enamel pin a foil trading card it's a pretty good time you can get my course learn character design over on learncharacterdesign.com it's over 18 hours of video learning subscribing to the channel lets you know when new videos are made available we make new videos every week on sunday evenings eastern time about five o'clock eastern is when you should look out for them you can follow me at bagel denizen on instagram twitter twitch and tick tock thank you so much for watching and have fun creating [Music] you

Channel: Brookes Eggleston - Character Design Forge

Views: 54,782

Keywords: hair, hair design, drawing hair, hair drawing tutorial, character design hair, character design forge, brookes eggleston, drawing characters hair, how to draw hair, how to design hair, how to draw character hair, character hairstyles, learn to draw hair, learn hair design, learn character design, goodwyn, alley griffin, bikos backpack, bageldenizen, how to make unlikable characters

Id: PRRQ-7fMQRY

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021