I just crossed with your posts about black hairstyles references and OMG I love your art style so fucking much. Im an European White person who likes to draw hairstyles with fun shapes a lot, so afros, braids etc are super fascinating to me because they can adapt so many different shapes.
However sometimes when I give different hairstyles to the same black character I have issues with traslating the braids's lenght to the afro's size and vice versa. I always end Up thinking that I made the braids way too long or the afro way too short. I don't know if you could give me some advice on this.
You can actually get away with the braid length depending on the characters hair type tbh! It can even be a cool little character trait you imply by their hair alone! Many things come into play with hair, one of those is something we call ‘shrinkage’! For some black people, I think for hair in the 4C range mainly, their hair can have heavy ‘shrinkage’. Meaning that their hair is SO curly/kinky, it’s shrinks back closer to their scalp after being combed out to its full length. Ever see hair videos of a black person talking about their hair, and it’s looks like it’s barley neck length, but when they stretch a clump out, it’s almost as long as their arm? That’s shrinkage! I’m saying all this to say, maybe if you have a character with an Afro, but you give them long braids, maybe they have heavy shrinkage in their hair! I think that’d be a cute little character thing to see in some characters fr😭 But a helpful tip I can give is, an Afro is really just our hair combed out fully, and puffed up. I’d say really the height/width of the Afro would be the best teller to how long the hair would be if it was braided. A small Afro would probably have neck length braids. Anything bigger might be up to/past the shoulder a bit. And the more exaggerated you get in size, the longer it would be!
