If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you know one of my favorite subjects to draw is horses.
What you may not know is that one of reasons—maybe the biggest reason—I like drawing horses is all that long, luscious hair!
Horses aren’t the only subjects with long, luscious hair. So when I came across an excellent video tutorial on drawing hair, I realized many of you might also be fascinated by the process.
The review is provided by Emmy Kalia on YouTube. Emmy’s YouTube channel and her web site feature tutorials in colored pencils and graphite with a special focus on human subjects. Some of her most interesting videos are about drawing hair and skin tones.
How to Draw Hair
The video is a “hair” over 23 minutes long, so grab a cup of coffee or hot chocolate, sit back, and be amazed.
Here’s Emmy.
Isn’t that fabulous, and aren’t those Faber-Castell browns enticing? If you don’t already own a set, have you put them on your wish list? I hope so because they’re on mine!
Tips for Drawing Hair
When drawing any type or length of hair, keep your pencils sharp, especially when drawing loose or flyaway hairs.
Work from light to dark and use the darkest color to add accent shadows after establishing other colors.
Start developing highlights from the beginning. It’s easier to preserve them than to replace them.
Use an eraser, sticky stuff, or some other method to lift color and create lighter highlights and other accents. Emmy uses oil-based Faber-Castell pencils, so the pencil eraser she uses is very effective. It’s less effective with wax based pencils, especially if you use soft pencils like Prismacolor Soft Core.
Don’t forget the details! Little things like a few flyaway hairs, little shadows between groups of hairs, and brightened highlights make all the difference. But don’t overdo them. Sometimes less really is more!
Here’s a hair drawing I did several years ago. I chose the subject because of the hair and—along with the blanket—the hair is still my favorite part of it!
But the best part is that you can draw hair like this, too. All it takes is practice!
And a good subject.
