Hi everyone, I'm Alyssa and today I'll be showing you
guys how to paint semi-realistic anime hairstyles.
So today I'm using MediBang Paint Pro and it's a free drawing software that you can use. For female
hairstyles, I'm going to be drawing some straight hairstyle, a wavy hairstyle and one in braids.
So when I'm drawing hair, what I'd like to do first is start with a hairline. I'm just going
to sketch that in here and I'm just sketching in another colour, and I'm using the pencil tool.
What this hairline does is it serves as a guideline. Once I have my hairline, I'm just
going to create a new layer as well as work in a different colour. So for our straight hairstyle,
let's see what she looks like with bangs and you can see how when I'm drawing bangs, it's coming
from the hairline. When I'm drawing hair, what I like to do is kind of visualize it into parts.
So I like to start with hair at the front which is usually bangs if your character has
any or any -- a lot of anime characters have these hairs on the side. I want to have her hair
still growing from the hairline kind of tucked back. Next I'm adding a few strands on the side
of her head to create more depth in her hairstyle and once I have that,
I can draw the hair at the back. So for her at the back, I'm just going to figure out..
I want hair parting to be on this side of her head and I can continue drawing simple shapes.
I'm not drawing lots of detail lots of strands at this stage so I have this side
of her hair and then I'm going to draw the other side, so since her hair is parted here,
the flow of the hair is gonna be like this. Now I'm gonna draw basic shapes again
and notice how I'm drawing over the skull like around the skull. That's to create a
sense of volume because hair doesn't lay just flat on your head unless if it is
super oily, super wet and you can always adjust as you go; during the sketching stage, nothing is final.
And just some lines over there to help me express the flow of her hair and since I'm
drawing digitally, I can go ahead and check how my drawing is looking by flipping the canvas.
And it looks okay to me, not too skewed or anything like that.
And then from here I can add some more detail.
So I'm just drawing some strands near the end of her hair,
the hair that's tucked behind the ear, any strands of hair. I'm expressing the look of layered hair
over here, like hair falling on top of each other rather than just one block and notice how I'm
concentrating most of the detail either at the roots, around this area or near the end of the hair.
What we want to avoid including during the colouring stage is having detail
like everywhere. So I'm okay with this now. I'm just going to go ahead and clean it up a bit.
And there I just cleaned up the hair.
So what I'm going to do now is just turn off that sketch layer.
Now you wouldn't really be able to see eyebrows behind hair but I like the look
of eyebrows peeking through the hair a little bit -- it's a little bit of a stylistic choice.
So what I'm gonna do is erase just a little bit of it. So I'm just using the lasso tool here
and once I grab those areas of the eyebrows that I want to erase,
I have my eraser and I'm just going to knock back the opacity a little bit lower,
so it's not working at 100 percent. I'm just gonna erase a bit of the eyebrows. There we go.
For wavy hair, I'm still drawing with the idea of layers in mind. I'm drawing the
pieces of hair at the front first following the hairline and then the hair at the back. I'm also
using more curved lines. So I like to think of ribbons when I'm drawing these pieces of hair.
You can also think of the number '3' or the letter 'S' and you can use those lines to
create curves throughout the hairstyle. I've also focused on making the hairstyle a little bit wider
since wavy hair is generally more voluminous than straight hair
and to finish off this drawing, I've added more flyaways and individual strands
compared to the first hairstyle and this is to help express that feeling of bounciness and volume.
A simple way to draw braids is by drawing a center line first as a guide and drawing these
half heart shapes along it. Here I'm adding in those shapes to my line and I'm drawing one side
lower than the other and this is because braided hair is hair strands interlacing into another.
The size of the braid will get thinner towards the bottom and I'm drawing a hair tie and the
ends of the hair. After I'm done the basic drawing, I'm just going back and erasing bits of the center
line and making the braid look a bit puffier. Next I'm drawing an example with more movement involved.
I'm using the exact same approach by starting with a center line and
drawing my half heart shapes along it and cleaning it up at the end.
So right now I'm just drawing the braid hairstyle. So in my head she's going to have a hairstyle
that has all her hair pulled to the side and into a braid.
So now that I have all of them drawn, I can get to colouring and when we're colouring,
the method that I like to use when I colour is creating a new layer and I'm putting it
underneath the layer that I'm going to be colouring for -- if that makes sense. So this is going to be the
colours for my straight hairstyle so I'm going to make sure it's underneath that layer. So I'm just
going to be naming it straight hair colour and I'm gonna start colouring the entire area of the hair
just in a base colour. Start with brown. Let's start with something generic. Another method
that I like to use to get things done really quickly, if you have clean lines you could
just use the magic wand tool and select areas of your drawing. Another thing you can do -- so
right now I'm on the colour layer, I could always just use the lasso tool and outline
where I want the colour to go
and then filling it in with the insert button but since I'm rendering, I'm in that
mindset where I don't need everything to look super clean because it's going to be rendered.
It's going to be painted anyway. For the hairline, I'm kind of making it just a little jaggedy.
I'm just going to set these lines that I drew to multiply. So I'm going up here blending modes
or blending layers and I'm just going to hit multiply so that way you can see your lines
again because if your base hair color is too dark and your layer is just set to normal, you won't be
able to see the lines or if your hair colour is super dark, the lines might even appear lighter.
So what I like to do after I have my base colour is create a new layer and call it shading
and I like to clip my layer so what that's doing is clipping anything that I'm drawing
to that layer. So you can see that I'm drawing all over my screen but it's only stuck to that
base colour. I'm going to select the blending mode to multiply. The colour is so light but
since our layer is set to multiply, it appears as a shadow. So I'm just going to start colouring
here. For all of the hairstyles, I'm going to use the same light source. Let's say it's about here.
Like a soft light source coming from the top left. That way we know we need to concentrate
highlights on the side of the head. That also means we'll have more intense shadows on the side on
top of the layering shadow. So I'm just going to continue filling in the first layer of shadows.
My shadows are going to be on this side
and I just want to focus big areas of shadows as well as shadows on the right side and
ambient occlusion which is just like if you have a piece of hair that's layering on another one,
it will have a shadow casted on it. I just want to put enough shadows to express that volume.
So that would be my first layer of shadows. I actually want to make a second layer
and you're just creating more dimension and more a wider range of values this way.
Now the shadows are just getting darker on the second layer
and here we have our hair shaded but we are missing one pretty crucial thing. When
it comes to hair which is the shine or the highlights highlights as in where the sun
is hitting or the light source is hitting the hair since hair has oil in it, it creates this
shiny glossy look so I'm gonna add those in and not highlights as in different colours of the hair
of course, that's a different thing. So another method that I like to use:
I use the lasso tool. This is another thing that I do with highlights
I kind of just block out the highlights like this.
I'm holding shift. You can see the little plus sign on the cursor that means it's gonna grab
more selections. So we're just gonna create a new layer and I'm gonna fill this in with the
highlight colour so I can see this base colour that we were using. So I'm just gonna colour pick that
and then go a little bit lighter and a little bit more yellow and fill it in and then when I
deselect, I can see what those highlights look like. I want to reduce the intensity of the highlights
on the side of the hair since since the light source is coming from the top left. Anything at
the bottom will be a little less intense. So I'm just gonna erase at these highlights a little bit
and then what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna make a new layer
on top of everything. I can call that rendering.
And when I render in Medibang Paint,
I like to use the watercolour brush. If you want a bit more texture, you can use the
acrylic brush as well so what I'm going to do here is hold alt, that brings up the eyedropper
tool and this is the method that I use. I grab the colour here and blend together.
You can kind of blend back and forth depending on the shape that you want
and I'm just gonna do that starting with the highlights.
So I blended out most of the highlights, well -- if not all of them.
Now I'm just working with the shadows and darkening some lines as well. Now you guys can see
that I'm just blending out the hairline because before it was just like a bunch of jaggedy lines.
You can add another level of detail by adding
strands that stick out of the hair or any flyaways, etc.
I would put it in areas where there are highlights
instead of like this strand of hair in the shadow.
And then what I'm going to do is fade out some of these pieces of hair with the eraser tool.
I'm just gonna get the soft eraser down here and there we go, that is our straight hairstyle.
So now I'm going to start working on the wavy hairstyle. We're gonna use some more
fun colours instead. This time I like working on multiply layers when I'm shading because it's
a convenient digital shortcut instead of having to manually pick out a colour myself to fit every
change in nuance in my base colours, I just need to decide what I want my shadow colour to be
and the multiply layer does the rest. When shading try to avoid using only black or gray, doing this
can make your colours look flat and muddy. I like to use more red, blue or violet tones.
Here you can see I'm shading with a pale pink on my multiply layer and since her hair is also pink,
it shows up as a natural looking shadow colour. So the way that I'm going to add highlights to this
wavy hair is just slightly different compared to the straight hair since there is more volume in
different areas, what I want to do is treat it more like a ribbon. So when we look at a ribbon,
this applies to straight hair too, like when you grab straight hair and bend it you'll be
able to see these peaks with the highlights but with wavy hair it's already there so we want to
treat highlights and shadows on wavy hair like a ribbon. After I've placed my highlights,
I'm blending them in by colour picking the hair with my eyedropper tool and then I'm blurring the
edges of the highlight with my brush to make it less harsh looking. I'm also blending the
outline a little bit on the left side where the light is hitting the hair to create a more shiny
look.
When rendering a braid, I like to add highlights to the middle of each of those half heart shapes
that I mentioned before and doing this will help express the puffiness of the braid.
And as I go down to the end, the intensity of the highlight will decrease a bit since less
light is hitting it at the bottom. We also want the highlights at the top to be a bit brighter
and doing this will draw the viewer's attention to the character's face. Lastly,
I'm adding individual strands of hair sticking out of the braid and around the rest of the hairstyle.
We get a lot of requests for hair tutorials during our cartooning and anime art classes
so I hope this video gave you some insight on how to draw and render hair digitally. Be sure to stay
tuned for our male anime hair tutorial as well. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and
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