4 Part Tutorial- Part 4

By ~shley77
4 part series on creating realistic drawings
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

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gah, i hate hair, especially messy hair, lol. sorry gackt, it looks good on you, but its a pain
anyway, the onyl way to get through drawing hair, for me anyway, is to get yourself hyped up about it. usually, for me its the fact that its the last thing i have to do before the drawing is finished, unless of course, i burn it, tear it or something else. so, find a way to get hyped up so you can get through without ripping your drawing to shreads, then we can start with this tutorial, lol.

1. the first thing you'll want to do is just sort of generally outline any areas of dark shadows and bright highlights. also, usually i outline any area i know may be trouble spots, or require a lot of detail.
2. after you're finished with that, you can start shading any areas you want to start at. me, i start here, then stopped and went somewhere else. its happens a lot. anyway, there's a specific way i shade the hair in my portraits. when i shade, in order to make it look like hair, i always use varying strokes, going one way. this causes unevenness, which in the hair, we want. if you take a look at the pic, you'll see what i mean. then go back and darken the shadows if you so desire. next, add any stray hairs you see to the outer part of the hair. use a .5 lead pencil for this, unless you have a very light touch. when drawing individual hairs, i usually find that stroking from the inside(towards the head), outward causes a very natural looking affect for hair, because the human hand is naturally heavier in the beginning of the stroke, then lightens up slightly towards the end. anyway, in this picture, all the hairs were blurred, so to do that just use a blending tool of some sort to run back over them when you're done
3. on the right there, you can see the section of shadow when its done. of course, the surrounding area isn't finished. now, this is where it gets tedious, and people always ask me how to do this, so ill try and be very specific. i chose a small part of a detail area to show, and outlined it, on the left there. you probably wont be able to discern unless you look at the next picture.

4&5. okay folks, this is the fun part... after you've outlined a detail area, meaning an area where a lot of small individual hairs are very visible, start by shading in the darkest spots like in the picture. at first it will look very odd. now, go back and carefully bring the dark spot closer, closing in on the hair. when you feel the hair is thin enough, stop, then go on and do another spot the same way. finally, when you've completed that, go back and fill in the hairs ever-so slighlty, so that they are still visible, but look natural, like above. if a few hairs are lost in the process, its no big deal. in pencil, it is very difficult to mimick the hair exactly(not counting charcoal cuz white charcoal doesnt work overtop of dark pencil), unless you're brilliant like nimra then you can do anything with a pencil, but let's face it, there are not many nimra's in the world. anyway, hopefully that helped a lot guys. im sorry it took me so long to do a tutorial on portraits, but i had no idea how to go about doing that.