The way you shade hair is so beautiful! How do you do it?
Omg thank you so much!! Honestly shading the hair is one of my favorite parts of drawing ^^
1. Start off with your hair line art. I usually draw all my lines with a dull brown color, and this line art layer is set to Multiply. This makes your lines look colored without having to go back and indivually color them ^^
2. Decided which hair color you want to use. If you are drawing fan art, you can usually pick the colors from a screenshot, but if you’re drawing an original character (or the screenshots aren’t very detailed), then I highly recommend [this post] for different hair color palettes! The one I’m gonna use here is from that list.
For me, I use the left most color as the base color, and the other two colors are used in shading.
3. Fill in the hair with your base color (the leftmost color), on a new layer under your lineart layer.
4. Create a new layer over the base hair color, and set it to clipping (this means anything you draw on this layer will only show up on the layer below it). Now, pick the color in the middle and using the Airbrush tool (Big size, low opacity), add some very basic shading. (Its usually a good idea to have your light source established by now.)
5. On that same layer, use a watercolor brush to add strokes to show hair strands. Make sure not to overdo it, lest your hair end up looking too detailed. The closer to the shinier part you are, the less strokes you use. This helps the hair look softer overall.
(These are the settings of the brush I’m using:
(It’s a brush from Medibang Paint, but of course, you can apply this to other drawing softwares too!)
6. Still on the same layer! Now, select the rightmost color, aka the darkest one! Use the airbrush tool and add some more shading. Note how the area shaded with this color is smaller than with the first color.
7. Use the watercolor brush again, and add some more brushstrokes in the darkest color. Use this to accentuate the different sections of your hair.
Now that you’re done with shading, time to add highlights!
8. Create a new clipping layer above your shading layer, and set its blending mode to Add (I believe this is Luminosity for Sai users). Pick the leftmost color, aka the base color for this part. I used the Pencil tool at about 50% opacity to add the highlights. The strokes are kinda longer near the ends of the locks, I think this just looks neat. Whatever works for you is ok too!
9. On the same layer and using the same tool, now pick your darkest color and add highlights to the darker part of your hair (don’t make these too shiny though!)
10. Select the color of the main highlight you drew (in this case, it’s the really pale greenish blue color. Now, go back to your original base layer, and lock its transparency (meaning that once you lock it, you can’t color outside anything that’s not already drawn on the layer.) Using the airbrush, add some last shading to the main highlighted area.
Congrats, you’re done! ^^
AN OPTIONAL STEP: Create another layer over your highlights layer and set it to Overlay. Using a dark blue/purple color, you can accentuate the shadows and highlights!
I really hope this helps! 💕
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