Drawing hair

First - Second - third

This is a continuation of my hair tutorial.
This tutorial assumes you've read or done my first explanation on how to draw hair.
If you haven't, please click here and at least read through the beginning of it.
Let's get started.

You will still need my blonde color pallet if you want your hair to look similar to mine
and you'll need a hair outline so save both of these to your computer unless you're going with your own outline and colors.

Start with either a new transparent image, 300 x 300 or open the base project you've been working on,
assuming you've been doing my doll tutorials.
Zoom in 800% and turn on your grid set at 1x1 pixel.
If you're adding to your base and using my hair outline, add a new layer and copy and paste the outline to this layer.

Add another and call it hair outline.
Pick a color you want for the outline.
I used the fourth darkest color on my color pallet, #e1b14d, and pixel the outline of your hair.

I altered my outline a little and put a part in.
Select inside the hair and flood fill with a lighter shade.
I used #e7c466.

It looks kind of blah, doesn't it?

We're going to be using our dodge and burn brush to shade this.
You need to duplicate each layer as you shade to add more shading to it.
Be sure you've saved your work before going on.
Duplicate the original filled in layer and turn it off for the time being.
We're going to start by making some of the areas darker.
To do this, you need your burn brush.

There's a lot of trial an error in this part so I can't exactly tell you everything I did, but I start off with these settings.
Brush size 1
Hardness 4
Step 50
Density 100
Thickness 100
Opacity 60

Duplicate your hair filled layer and using the burn brush at size 1, paint some dark areas around the crown of the head.

Duplicate this layer and using the same burn settings, paint over parts of the crown and add some more darkness to this area.

Duplicate this layer and add some dark wave lines using same burn settings except increase the opacity to 100%.

Duplicate this layer and change the opacity on the burn brush to 30.
Add some lighter shades around the hair.

Duplicate this layer and change the opacity on the burn brush to 45.
Add some more shading through out the hair.
Don't forget to add some shading along the outline to help blend in the outline.

Now we need to lighten things up a bit.
There's three ways you can do this.
First, you can add some very light patches to the hair like we did in the previous hair tutorial and then add a Gaussian blur
or you can use your Dodge brush and brush over the areas you want light.
And the third way would be to use both the dodge brush and gaussian blur method together.

If you're going to use the first method, add a new layer and call it light highlights.
Using the lightest shade in my color pallet, draw some lines around the top of the hair and where the hair waves with your paint brush set to 2 - 3 pixels.

Apply a Gaussian blur with radius 3.
Sit on your hair outline layer, select all, float, invert.
Sit on the highlighted layer and hit your delete key.
Select none.

If you like how your hair looks, turn off all layers except the hair layers and merge visible.
This method for the highlights is done.

If you want to use your dodge brush, duplicate the last hair layer and set your dodge brush to these settings.
Brush size 1 -3
Hardness 4
Step 50
Density 100
Thickness 100
Opacity 100

I started off using a brush size of 2 or 3 and drew lines over the areas I wanted lighter.
I then changed the brush size to 1 and lighten some areas a little more.
There's a lot of trial and error going on here but this is what my hair looks like.

If you like how your hair looks, turn off all layers except your hair layers and merge visible.

If you want to use the last method, click on your last burn layer, the one before you lightened with the dodge brush and add some light higlights like I explained in the Gaussian blur method,
Bring this layer to the top.
Turn off all layers except for the hair layers and merge visible.
That's it but there's one final step, you can do no matter which method you used to add the lights to your hair.
Add a new layer and pixel some short ends around the hair.
It gives it kind of a fly away look.

If you're satisfied with your hair, be sure all layers except the hair layers are turned off and merge visible.
If you think you want to use this hair on other dolls, copy and paste the hair layer as a new image and save as a psp file.
You also might want to tube it.

I hope you've been able to follow my hair tutorials.
If you have any questions, be sure to stop by my PSP Addict message board and ask for some help or stop by and show us your work.

If you've saved your work, you can click here to do my dress tutorial.

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All graphics copyright Sheryl. Please don't take anything from this site and call it your own.