How To Do Hair With Doodles - A Tutorial
There was a main flaw in my last tutorial, and that was the baldness of Donnie Ninja Turtle. Fear Not! Here I come with a hair tutorial where we look at different hairtextures so you get an idea on how to do different types of hair!
Step1: Get your characters
Our victims today are April, CJ and Donnie (human version from Nuclear Family)
Easier said than done, right? Dont worry, we're going slow
Step 2.1: Identify the hairline
We all have hairlines. Some are receding, some are not, theyre different shapes, but getting an idea of where hair comes from is good to know the general direction
Step 2.2: Think of the shapes
Hair tends to be divided in 3 parts: Bangs, top half and bottom half. Then theres also side burns and more complex stuff, but lets keep it simple
Its easier to think of hair in terms of general shapes and volumes than individual strands. Lets get this to our subjects
just realized maybe these werent The Best characters to choose but its too late we're comiting to it
Straight hair tends to blend in together better. If the hair has more volume, you may needa add more shapes
fuck it we adding bad hair day Leo
We not gonna stop for long here because the fun part here is the rendering process
We are gonna use the same process that we used over here, but imma focus on the hair aspect a lil more
As mentioned, we're treating the hair as an object, a mass. This type of hair forms puffs, and you need to identify the main volumes of it. As we talked before, errase the areas that are hit by light
for the second layer of shadow, we're adding to the volume information by darkening the areas further from the light
This just helps to diferenciate between volumes
Exact same concept. CJ's hair is very straight and stays together a lot, so his hair is very straightforward (hah). Identify main areas stuck by light, darken parts that arent
Same concept all over. Only part that makes locs "harder" (they arent actually harder) is the fact that, unlike the other two, locs are separated into more volumes and more strands. However, they follow the exact same logic
You guessed it: same concept. Id argue this hair might be harder than the curlier types. Very tight curls, if more afro like, act like one main mass and are easier to follow, same with locs. Wavy hair is defined enough so that you needa pay more attention to the sections, but not uniform like straight hair. However, again, same logic: Identify main areas hit by light, darken parts that are not there
As you can see, all hairtypes follow the same logic. Its all about identifying main volumes and shapes and following acordingly
First pass of light is just there to lighten up the drawing, you can check my rendering tutorial for more info, its not very important. Just a soft overlay over general areas to add faint glow
As I said, not very hair relevant
Step 6: Main Hair Highlights
Heres where things start getting interesting. First, identify the main areas where the light hits. There, add a big highlight shape (overlay, light yellow)
Now, this is a bit too harsh; time to soften it. Not much, just a lil
Now its time to errase. We wanna focus on the highlight area, and by errasing you get to focus more on the shape. With straighter hairs you follow the direction of the hair, while with curlier ones you errase away from the general shape
taking away from it helps add some volume and definition to the shape of the hair. After this i lower the opacity because I dont wanna overwhelm the drawing too much. We are slowly building layers, it helps, trust
Did i mention I like highlights? Anyways, here is when we finally break from the "one main shape" mentality and add some strand-shaped highlights. This is just a few highlight strands, and just around the areas we highlighted in the previous step. We dont wanna go crazy just yet
Depending on the hair texture, these highlights will be curly, wavy, or straight
If you notice in Aprils hair, I did small curved lines, but not actual curls. Why?
in a ringlet of curly hair, only one bit of the curl is exposed to the light. This way of drawing hair is very much not defined, but we still follow this logic by implying the shape of the curl through the highlight
I like to soften these highlights too and lower the opacity again so they dont overwhelm the rest of the drawing
Heres where you can go crazy and have fun drawing extra individual strands. now, you needa take into account, the more you do, the messier the hair will look. If you want messy hair, you'll get a lot of flyaways. If the hair is purpesfully styled, you'll get less
The method I use is colorpick from different parts and draw the hairs with different colors depending on where they are. Its best to work from dark to light, in my experience
(reaching the image limit fuck)
April: Because here we are doing individual strands, you can go for drawing the curl shape better
CJ: His hair is slicked back and looked kinda greasy. The greasier the hair is, the more it'll clump together
Donnie: When doing locs, follow the shape of the loc with the details. I like doing details particularly with locs because it makes them seem fluffier, and I really like the look of them
Leo: His hair is freer and fluffier than Casey's, so he has a lot more flyaways
As we've seen, theres no one hair texture thats easier or harder than the other- its all practice, really, and finidng a method that works out. I've been experimenting for a while and my process isnt foolproof yet, but hopefully this can help some of yall out :D
