Visitor request: Drawing hair in Photoshop

This tutorial has been requested by a Tip-Kit visitor, but i'm sure others will find it useful as well. We're going to be learning some methods of digital hair creation today. Unfortunately, the key to drawing realistic hair is ... time and effort. I wish i could say there's an easy way of doing it, but there isn't. You would probably achieve the best results by using a 1px brush and just painting individual hairs, but in this guide we'll be a little lazy and paint the hair in strands. There's lots of ways to do it and we'll only explore some of them.

Preparing the hair brush

We will need a custom hair brush for this tutorial so let's create a new white document. I've used 50x50 pixels document for this tutorial, but it really depends on how much hair you want each stroke to paint, how close they are to each other, the size of the document etc. Just use 50x50 for now to simply get the idea. When you create a document, press D for default color values, X to exchange them and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill the background with a foreground color (white in this case). Now exchange the color values again (X) and grab a brush tool

from the tools palette. Change it to a 1px hard brush. Once again, the size may vary depending on the size of your document. I'll be using a pretty small document in this tutorial so 1 pixel hair is what i need. You can also set the opacity of the brush to about 80% so then some of the hairs will be less intense then the others. It's really up to you. The thing you want to do now is create a few small dots on the document like this:

The picture above is zoomed in quite a lot - that's why it looks a little weird and pixelated. Now go to Edit > Define Brush Preset ... and enter a name for this new brush. I've used hair 1 for the name. Basically what we've done here is created a brush that will paint all these dots at the same time when we use it. So instead of one dot that we usually have, we will now have a few. You can imagine how this speeds things up. Close the document, we don't need it anymore. Now create a new document and fill the background with white. Don't use a large size, 400x400 px will be more than enough for our learning purposes. Let's choose a basic color for the hair first, add a new layer and paint a blob like this:

You won't do that when you paint the actual hair. Instead, you will draw an outline of the entire hair area and fill it with this color, but for the learning purposes we'll make it simpler and imagine that's the whole hair our subject has :) If you don't understand why we've just drawn this silly form, here's an explanation for you: instead of painting each and every hair we will use an "optical illusion" and save ourselves some work. The shape we've just drawn represents our hairline and, as you know, people have millions of hairs. But do we see all the hair of a person? No, we don't, we only see a little part of it that's closest to us and the rest of the hair is below the visible part. So why should this be different? We can simply paint our hair with its basic color and paint individual hair on top of it. Finally we will end up with something that looks like hair but won't quite have as many individual lines of hair as it should: the background color (base hair color) will be seen through and give us an illusion that there's hair below. Drawing hair is as simple as painting with different shades of our basic color so when choosing a basic color make sure it's neither too bright nor too dark, because we will need to shade and highlight it. But we're not quite finished with making our hair brush yet so open up the brushes engine (Window > Brushes), select a brush preset that you've created earlier (should be the last one on the list) and change the spacing in the brush tip shape tab to 1%:

And finally we have a ready brush to draw our hair. Press the new brush button

in the bottom of the brushes engine and enter another name for the brush (like hair 1_1). This will save our current preset so that we didn't have to change the spacing all the time we want to use this brush. As you know, the hair has gradual decrease in width and the current brush doesn't have it. This changes if you have a digital tablet: the harder you press the pen against the tablet - the more opaque the hair will be, so painting would be similar to drawing with a real pen. If you don't have a tablet, however, it's a little more complicated. Read the sections below to start painting the hair itself - we will be covering both tablet and tablet-less methods.

If you don't have a digital tablet

A tablet is a digital device just like a pen that connects to your computer and enables you to easily draw stuff. Without it you will find it very difficult drawing the shapes you need so it would be a good idea to get one. Anyway, those who don't have a tablet have 2 choices: either paint by hand with your mouse, using steel patience or form the shapes with a pen tool. Let's explore the second option. Personally i don't like it, because it's not fun at all, but it's better than trying to paint something with a mouse. First you need to select the pen tool

from the tools palette. Look at the top of Photoshop's window and you'll find a tool settings panel. Define the below settings:

And it would probably be a good idea to make a new layer on top of everything for our actual hair. So do it. Next thing we will be doing is adding some guides for our hair to follow. To do that, click somewhere on the top part of the hair "blob" and drag a little. This will add a single point and draw a line through that point. What we're making here is a curve that defines our hair flow and the point we've just made is a top point of this curve. The line that runs through the point is not the actual line! It's an adjustment handle that allows us to adjust the curvature of the line we're drawing. Here's a visual example of what i'm talking about:

You can see a line with 3 points, 2 of them being adjustment handles and the middle one is our actual point. Let's add another point to complete our curve. Do exactly the same: click somewhere on the bottom of the hair and drag a little to enable the adjustment line:

As you can see, we have a curved line now and we can adjust its curvature with the help of adjustment handles. If you don't like the way the curve looks - hold the CTRL key and click on any of the points. If you click on middle points, you'll be able to drag them around, thus making the curve longer or shorter and if you click on the points of an adjustment line, you'll be able to adjust the curvature. Give it a try: click on any of the adjustment handles while holding CTRL and drag them around to see how the curve changes. Only by experimenting you'll learn how this stuff works. Anyway, we now have a single line of hair and we need more than that. To add more, pick the path selection tool

from the tools palette and click anywhere on the document to deselect the current line. Now go back to the pen tool and draw another one. To do that quickly, use P key on your keyboard to select the pen tool and A key to select the path selection tool. Draw a few curves like so:

Remember when we talked about the fact that the actual hair fades and our brush can only do that when we use a tablet? That's a bit of a problem with this drawing method and yet another reason to get yourself a tablet. In our example we will have to simulate the pressure and the actual fade. To do this, grab the brush tool and go to the brushes engine (Window > Brushes). Open up a shape dynamics tab:

Change the value of first combobox to fade and enter some number in the field next to it. The bigger the number is - the longer the hair will be before actually fading. This is purely experimental and you will probably have to redefine this number for each project you have. In my case i use a 300 pixel fade. Let's see how this simulation works. We should change the foreground color to something else. So change it to a lighter or a darker shade of the base hair color. Grab the path selection tool, click anywhere on the document to deselect all the curves you've made, then right-click on the document and choose stroke path .... A dialog box will appear, asking you to choose a tool you want to stroke the path with. Select brush from the list and and press OK. Now press ENTER to get rid of the curved guides and see the actual drawn hair:

As you can see, we've got quite a lot of individual hairs from just a few lines. That's because our brush consists of more than one point. If you see that the lines fade too quickly or too slowly, CTRL+Z a couple of times and change the fade value in the brush engine until you get a good result. See how difficult that is? There's just too much work to do with this technique and painting with the tablet would've been much easier. But later about that. Now pick the pen tool and draw some more lines, following the same hair flow:

Once again, deselect all the curved guides by pressing A (the path selection tool) and clicking somewhere on the background, then right-click, choose stroke path ... and stroke it with a brush. Only this time use a slightly different shade of the basic color:

As you can see, it starts to get some depth. Repeat the process until you have enough hair. Don't forget to use darker and lighter colors to define shadow and highlight areas. Here's how my picture looks after a few more lines:

As you can't see it doesn't look that good, because i am very impatient and don't like this method so i haven't managed to sustain a similar hair flow and it looks kinda chaotic now. But if you add lots of work and time to this, you can actually get pretty nice results. You might not need the hair blob in some cases and in some you'll just allow it to be seen through. In this case, however, there should be longer hair and even more of them to completely cover that blob. With the help of this method, however, you have the luxury of precision: you can create various hair styles and shapes. Doing that with a mouse or tablet might prove difficult for inexperienced people. And with the pen tool formed curves, you can easily create any shape and stroke it with the hair:

You can also grab the brush and try drawing the hair by hand. You will probably get something very funny because it's very difficult to do that with a mouse. But if for some reason it seems easy for you - it should be less painful than creating and stroking the guides with the pen tool. And because your brush is set to fade, the lines you draw will also be faded.

If you do have a digital tablet

Thank god you do! It makes life much easier. There's basically not much to say about drawing hair with the pen tablet, because it's pretty much the same as drawing with a real pencil, but a few facts are worth mentioning. First of all, we won't be using colors this time. Well, not directly. Once again we will have our blob of hair, but this time we will use special tools to darken or lighten hair strands and we will do everything on the same layer as the blob itself. Remember that the method we used above can be used here as well (we can draw strands in lighter and darker shades of a basic color) and the method below can also be used in conjunction with the method above. Anyway, i'm just trying to explain a few techniques in a few situations and you'll have to decide for yourself which suits you best. So let's continue. First of all we will make the hair blob look better by adding some faded hair at the end. To do that, grab the smudge tool

from the tools palette, set its brush preset to the hair brush, but this time make sure that the fade is not enabled. It should be set to pen pressure. So with the help of your tablet, click somewhere near the outer edge of the hair blob and drag out some fluffy hairs:

Make sure the smudge tool's exposure value in the tool settings panel (the horizontal panel at the top of photoshop's window) is set to a high number (even a 100% will do, because you still control the strength with the pressure of the digital pen). With the help of the smudge tool you can add more hair strands on the blob to make it look more realistic. Here's what i mean:

As you can see the quality of the hair i draw is quite bad. You must excuse me for that, because i don't have a tablet at this time with me and i have to use a mouse so i simply can't draw anything beautiful since i don't have any pressure control at all. Your results will probably look more realistic and way better than mine, but that's just an example explaining the technique and we don't need it to be perfect. So the next step after creating all the fluffyness and such is to add some depth. To do that we will be using dodge

and burn tools

from the tools palette. The dodge tool is used to lighten colors and the burn tool - to darken them. So let's pick any of them (i'll start with dodge), select a hair brush (once again with pen pressure control instead of the fade) preset and a low exposure. Also change the range to midtones. Here's the visual representation of these settings:

Now start drawing on the blob and see how parts of it become lighter:

Change the exposure to an even bigger value and lighten some specific areas:

Don't forget that in your case this entire blob must be smudged and have fluffy edges. Otherwise it will look as stupid as mine, but i just don't have the time to do it with a mouse. Now select the burn tool and add some shadows. Use the same settings as for the dodge tool:

Switch between the both tools to add more detail to the hair:

At this point i've lost my temper and smudged out the entire hair, because i couldn't look at that banal blob. It looks better than before, but it's still made with a mouse so your tablet result should look way better than this one. Anyway, as i've already mentioned before, it's just a technique and the illustrating example doesn't have to be perfect - it's you who'll make it look good! You might also not succeed with your first hair brush so make a few of them and use the one that works better for you. Make a brush with only a few black dots, another with more dots and another with even more than the previous and see which one works best for you.

So i hoped you've learned something new today and excuse me for the poor examples - i might come back and redo them with an actual tablet someday to see what it could really look like.