Key to draw hair: BE PATIENT

I always thought hair would be the easiest and fastest section to draw… it’s just a bunch of lines in any order…that’s it…well no!....drawing hair is not as easy or as fast as it looks like. In fact hair could account for around 30 – 40% of the time I spend in a drawing. I learned through my own process that hair gives character and volume to the drawing. A bad drawn hair could ruin all the drawing. The reality is that the hair (even if it’s not much) is the wrapper of the whole face and it gives the final shape that you see in real live. Think of it as the edge of the head (which it actually is). So if the hair drawing is not well done, the face is unfinished, it looks odd. Here are some tips to start drawing hair:

Divide the hair into sections, identify those sections as change in light, change in hair color, change in direction of hair
Draw those big sections with a hard pencil (3H or 2H work)
Then start drawing (patiently) hair by hair with a hard pencil. I use a hard pencil so if I make a mistake is easy to erase, rather than erasing a 4B or 6B line
Then star finding the values within each section of hair. Do some smudging of the initial lines so you have a base for shadows
Start with the darkest and lightest areas, which have the less detail. Finish with the sections with average light (usually those are the ones with more details)
Be patient