How to Color and Paint Hair
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Ok folks, this is my first tutorial ever that will show you step by step on how to color hair using Paint Tool Sai, a great program for digital painting. I will be guiding you through my every day process on a quick painting of a simple girl face. Yo
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To start, I have opened a document which is an already inked girl figure with hair that I've prepared for the sake of this tutorial. You'll want to have inked something like this in Sai. Whatever line art you have to spare, whip it out in Sai and we'
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If you've already made two separate layers for your background and line art, make a new one between the two. When you put a layer underneath your line art one, the colors will be underneath the lines instead of being painted on top of it.
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Rename your layer to 'Flats' as we're going to be laying down the flats. Grab the Magic Wand tool and adjust to the settings you see. The 'Color Difference' setting will make the wand select a wider range of pixels on the canvas that is similar to th
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Now, fill the layer, an easy shortcut is combining the keys 'Ctrl + F' in order to fill the whole selection.
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I always start off with a very dark flat color so that I can etch in highlights more accurately.
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When you're trying to visualize light source, picture it as a simple sphere. You've got your light source which is aiming from the top onto the ball; your highlight, which is what lights up the object due to the light source; then there's the shadows
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Whip out the airbrush tool and adjust to the settings you see here. These are the settings I use ALL the time. However, these will only work if you have a pen stylus or drawing tablet.
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Keeping in mind your direction of light source, softly brush in the lightest parts of the hair. The light will be hitting my subject from the top right corner. Keeping in mind your light source is very important to create visually effective images.
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I start taking a lighter color of grey with a tint of blue that compliments the heavy blacks. As I work around the hair, I taper the less brightening highlights from the main sources. Notice how some areas are lighter than others.
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Taking a lighter color than the previous, add lighter highlights depending on how close the light source is hitting the hair. Other details that may need highlighting would be individual strands 'shimmering' to bring out the intensity of depth in the
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And that's pretty much it! If you want to do some experimenting and color different varieties of hair hues, you've got to have solid knowledge about the color wheel. This is explained below.
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Understanding the color wheel isn't rocket science. You've got a few simple ways to contrast different colors in your artwork by using 'contrasting colors'. This color wheel dissects the strategies to use to create interesting color combinations, esp
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Using the knowledge of the color wheel and experimenting with color combinations, you can create a vast majority of hair styles. I hope you guys enjoyed this lesson, it was real fun to make. I'll be back with more tuts like these, and am always open
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February 15, 2017
Description: This tutorial goes out to all you folks out there that has asked me to make a lesson on how to draw and color hair. I now have a new found love for drawing and coloring hair because this lesson made me want to do more of it. Anyways, I really love the style of this girl. Her makeup, face, even the little nose is very welcoming and charming to the eye. Of course you can color in your hair any shade you like, I just happen to love pink for her with a dusty black makeup job. I do hope this lesson helps you draw and color hair because I know how frustrating it can be trying to figure out how to do something like coloring hair. Let's face it, drawing hair can be a lot easier then coloring it. Have fun and don't forget to give me some feedback on what you thought of the lesson.
