This tutorial will be placing an emphasis on hair brushes. It can be extremely helpful when it comes to making dash icons, picspams, & coloring hair as the hair brushes can help make your image look more natural, even if it’s just a slight adjustment here & there.
it will show you how to go from
to this
to this
please like/reblog if this tutorial helps you!
So here we have you image, not shown: cropping it to how I wanted it positioned ( the actual image is much larger ) & apply sharpening.
The first step is coloring your background, for this image I used coloring similar to the colors found in her hair ( contrary to other pictures from the picspam from my personal blog where I used different background colors from her hair, dress, and the natural background ) this is shown with the red line.
Fill it all in, I suggest using a brush with 55-70% hardness because it helps make the coloring look more natural. Also whenever I do coloring, I just hand brush it but you can do it however you choose.
The next step is adding a gradient, not necessary but I think it makes the image look nice. Following the scheme of grabbing colors from her hair, I used the base color from before & the brightest color which happened to be the yellow highlight on the right side. Apply that gradient as a clipping mask onto the base layer.
Now comes the coloring!
To find hair brushes you can look them up on deviantart where there are several ( I probably have 6 different brush sets from there ). here & here are the links to two of my favs & they are the ones used primarily in this tutorial.
Instead of explaining how I color the hair, I figured it might be more useful to see how I colored the hair.
But basically what you are doing is choosing colors from the hair, following the direction of the hair, & then erasing the bits that don’t fit. The most important thing is to use multiple layers, you can always merge them as you go. Usually whenever I change colors, I’ll make a new layer for that color. Also it’s important to grab different bits of color within the same section. In the gif below, I grabbed some of the more orange-y color & then put that layer below my yellow layer. This just helps add to the natural look of things.
Once you’ve added all the hair you want, add your psd & you are done!
Here are some additional gifs showing you other hair additions.
