How to draw hair

so you want to draw hair okay I don't know about you but for the longest time I had no idea how to approach it it's so complicated there are all these strands going all over the place and if you draw all of the strands it doesn't look good but when you simplify it it looks too plain how are you supposed to approach it what's the right balance it took me a long time but eventually I was able to sort of figure it out and got my hair drawing looking something like this I'll share the steps I took in my thought process and hopefully it'll help you figure it out as well so usually when I want to learn how to draw something I just study how it looks like in real life and it's no different this time let's study real life hair I've been drawing for a while now but I realized I've never actually studied real hair a single time well there's a first time for everything right so let's give it a shot I started by taking a softish kind of brush and trying to directly copy what I saw but it doesn't look very good and I guess since it's my very first time it's not the worst thing in the world that it's a bit messy when I get confused by studying something I try to simplify it down so I understand it better so this time I tried restricting myself to fewer values which helped a lot I also tried looking for references with a stronger light source so that the light and Shadow was clearly defined which makes it easier for me to simplify I also get to practice drawing that distinctive hair highlight that we love from these studies I learned that hair can be really shiny with big contrast almost like metal or other kinds of reflective surfaces I also did some studies of textured hair as well which on the surface seems really different from straight hair I'm really not the most experienced at drawing textured hair so please forgive me if I'm not perfect at it I tried my best but in general I approached it the same way while trying to keep in mind the unique attributes of textured hair first start by getting the overall shape and silhouette right the shape can actually get a lot more interesting than straight hair and the hairstyles are also a lot more varied so I took special care to make sure that the form read well with just two values there's also lots of different types of curls and I've honestly barely scratched the surface with this so I can definitely get way deeper into it I learned that for all types of hair you don't really need to draw every single strand but properly understanding the color properties of hair and having good control of values will make it look like hair so through my hair studies I felt like I was definitely improving but for some reason something felt off something felt really weird while I was doing these studies and I couldn't quite put my finger on why but before we get to that a word from today's sponsor xpen okay wait even though this was sponsored they asked me to do an honest review of the XP pen magic drawing pad which is a Sleek Standalone Android drawing tablet so first impressions the box came with a bunch of things like a pen TPU case cables and a nice tablet glove the device itself is thin and portable so it's perfect if you're looking to do some Urban sketching while out and about I also really appreciated how this device seems to be designed for drawing more than some other tablets on the market the screen is bright colorful and has a lovely textured matte surface that feels good to draw on for me the most important thing about a drawing tablet is that the pen feels fluid and responsive the magic drawing pad absolutely delivers I would say that I felt like it had even less latency than any of my other display tablets from other brands unfortunately it being an Android tablet means that it may not have access to certain iOS or Windows only drawing apps even though there are a slew of perfectly capable Android drawing apps like Ibis paint X which comes free with this tablet overall I think it's a great little device that's great for drawing on the go thanks again to XP pen and enjoy the rest of the video like I mentioned before I've never studied real life hair before ever but wait that doesn't exactly make sense how is it possible I was able to draw all of these characters I mean that's definitely hair so how could I possibly be learning to draw hair for the first time if I already draw hair if you know what I mean I was actually going kind of crazy because this is always what I do to learn so why wasn't it working this time I don't get it am I freaking stupid why am I not understanding anything at all by drawing realistic hair thankfully jeo came to watch My Stream and he made the remark that hair specifically is a little different for concept artist is not relevant to draw realistic hair yeah although I don't know if I count as a concept artist anymore and stylized hair compared to the rest of human is specifically kind of different to its real life counterpart with his comments I finally realized that the way I approach stylized or anime hair is completely different from real life hair and that's why it felt off nothing I was studying felt relevant because I just don't draw hair like this so let me start again but this time I'll approach it as stylized hair from the very beginning so this is how I like to break down stylized hair the first thing I like to keep in mind is that hair doesn't just vaguely exist it grows from the scalp that sits on top of the skull even if I'm drawing improbable anime hair so first draw the head it isn't exactly a sphere more like kind of a pill shape stretch out a little bits then I sketch in the hairline then I like to determine where the hair originates it can be a parting or a whirl your hair will come from this line or this point and even if I'm drawing more realistic hair I don't want to draw every individual strand instead I prefer to separate them into easier to understand chunks I like to think of flat hair like ribbons and ribbons are flat which means that you probably don't want to draw them as tube shapes unless your drawing locks even if they are flat they still exist in 3D with which means that they can bend around the head and they can twist and they might even have a little bit of thickness wavier or curlier hair can even go in spirals now for textured hair the same applies but there's stuff to keep in mind because there's a lot more variety in hairstyles and more volume instead of breaking them down as ribbons try identifying the larger shapes of the hairstyle I use tubes if I'm drawing locks and puffs kind of look like spheres to me and once I figured out the main shape I can add texture by Bri piing up the silhouette and adding a little bit of hatching so now that I have a bunch of big shapes how do I turn these shapes into hair how do I make these ribbons look like hair you may have heard that hair is just all about shape design but what does that actually mean let's start with a basic ribbon pretty boring right so let's add some interest by either cutting the ribbon or adding strands to it but if I just cut it up like this it doesn't look very good right so how can I make it look better I like to think of good design as adding as much variation as possible so I can try changing the widths of the strands I can also vary up the lengths of the strands of course this depends on how evenly the hair is cut but I can also adjust where the Strand starts splitting off to change the length I can change the angle again that depends on how neat the hair is supposed to be but changing the angle can also make it look more organic I also like adding strands that cross over over each other some people may be wondering how they're supposed to know how much to vary things it's fine at all to say make them different but how different both of these are different which one are people supposed to use so there's this basic design principle I like to keep in mind when drawing hair there's a specific ratio that generally looks pleasing and I've heard that this ratio is approximately at a 70 to 30 ratio I've also heard variations of this ratio like 60 30 10 as well and the cool thing I found about this is that you can apply this principle this ratio recursively if splitting the hair like this doesn't look detailed enough I can go in and split it up even further now that's definitely here it's time to move on to shading okay so I think the biggest issue I used to struggle with is getting bogged down to the details of shading rather than keeping the overall shape in mind and it's really easy to fall into this trap because if you think about hair in real life it's really complicated there's lots of strands so don't we want to make sure to capture all of that detail for me it works better to try to keep the overall shape in mind and get down the big Shadow shapes first after I get these shapes established and looking good then I can start implying the texture by refining my shadow shapes I do this by paying special attention to the edge of the Shadow and the silhouette by doing something really simple like this I can make the sphere look furry if the edges of your Shadow and silhouette look right your brain will just fill in the rest but what about highlights now highlights are a type of specular like that little spot of light you see right here but on here this dot is stretched out because it's a type of an isotropic specular okay that's a little bit complicated so I won't cover it in this video but in short having a lot of grooves in the same direction tends to stretch out the specular the math of specular is a bit complicated but in general you can make a good guess by putting them approximately where the light is coming from one thing to note for textured hair though is that because the strands tend to be less aligned the specular appears less apparent and is less bright the overall mass of hair acts a little bit more like a matte surface of course this depends on the curl type and the overall styling okay at this point I would be happy to call it I don't need to add more detail and it looks enough like hair to me but there's a couple of finishing touches I like to add to give it that extra special pop these are optional well everything is optional but extra optional I talked a lot about not needing to add texture but adding some texture can help bring the overall piece together if I do this though I make sure to keep it really subtle so I don't break up those Shadow shapes I work so hard on then I add a little bit of color correction and here's the final results I think it turned out all right although in particular I feel like I could have worked on the face a little bit more and I never intended to draw this silly anime hairstyle in such detail so it looks a little bit funny especially these um mysterious floating hair in ten so what do you think about the final result let me know in the comments and draw some detailed hair for the Subscribe button catch you next time bye-bye uh One More Time intro now that's definitely hair if you ask enough on YouTube videos will you do a dragon tutorial yes and that one is actually very likely because I've wanted to learn how to draw dragons for a very freaking long time I really really need to draw Monster Hunter Fan Art it's not a want I need to do Monster Hunter Fan Art

Channel: pikat

Views: 32,041

Keywords: vtuber, art, drawing, XPPen

Id: Qzv1WW45TTo

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2024