Help! Need a Realistic Hair (Pencil Drawing) Tutorial

[Cybrex]

I have already looked all over the net, and cant find anything that is of any use, I am working on a drawing of my g/f and her dog (a b-day present for her) and I have never been good at drawing hair, at all. I was hoping someone has done a tutorial on these forums that might be of help, her b-day is in 3 weeks and I cant start shading till I can do hair (dog is the first to be done, then her).

Help me mighty artists, your my only hope. :)

[drd]

Curly or straight, covered.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/39739048/

Not by me, by this guy named foxbane (Might be a girl, actually)

Dunno if I'm allowed to post links to other sites but it seemed appropriate.

[Flake]

Ninja digital painter and all round nice chick Linda B. has a tutorial that might be of some use to you.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?threadid=259468

[Cybrex]

Oh sorry DRD and Flake, I meant pencil drawing. I never even thought about PS. Sorry. I'll correct the title.

[drd]

Hm...can't really help you there...I mean, everyone does it differently, I suppose.

[Cybrex]

Ya, and I dont do it at all. Normally Im drawing things that dont normally need hair.

[Atlantis]

I had both of these bookmarked... :P

http://drawsketch.about.com/library/weekly/aa032303a.htm

http://www.sibleyfineart.com/index.htm

Remember to block in the values - don't draw the hairs one at a time.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: On the second link, you have to go to "Studio Tips" at the left to find the tutorial. Sorry about that - his site won't let me direct link it, seems.

[Zizi]

First post, and yes, rather than posting work or introducing myself, I'm compelled to help someone else. Just the way I roll, I suppose. ;)

I'm far from what I'd call a total expert on hair in pencil(I'm not sure I know anyone that feels they qualify as such, no matter how good at it they are), but here's some things I've taken from efforts to render hair in pencil and similar media. You can take this as not so much a tutorial help, as things I personally try to bear in mind when i draw hair realistically.

- In media like graphite, colored pencil, charcoal, ink, and so on, it's important to think about the task properly. In most of these cases(except ink, if you happen to use white ink), you can only go darker, not lighter. True, there are white charcoal pencils, white color pencils, and so on, but I've never had any of those work as well as a bit of carefully-left-blank paper(in general. Obviously there's a lot of cases where it works fine, like mid-toned paper, but I'm assuming white paper and plain graphite, for the most part). The upshot of this is that you need to be thinking in terms of negative space. Most of the time when I'm rendering in graphite, it's more about drawing where the hair isn't, rather than where it is. This, of course, goes mostly for blonde and light hair colors where most of the hair could be said to be a highlight. I suppose the better way to put it is that you draw around the highlight areas. In any case, working from dark to light tends to work for me.

-Resist the urge to fuss over hyper-realism. Pencilled hair, in my opinion, tends to look better if you work loosely and don't worry about getting every strand laid down, unless you happen to be an artist that does such realism very well. Getting the overall blocks of tone down and the shape of the hair right, and then simply indicating the strands tends to work better in most cases.

-All hair is not created equally. Blonde is different from red is different from black. The basic principles of rendering them out in pencil is roughly the same, but you'll find tons of little differences in practice.

-I find one of the best things I can do when rendering in pencil from a reference, is to make sure I use a desaturated(grayscale) image. Be it a photo , a drawing, whatever. If I intended to work from a model, I snap a photo and desaturate it. I will then still use the model, as there are subtleties you can only get with real light, but having the monotone reference handy is useful for judging tones-- this is especially true of using a monotone medium, like graphite, but I'll even do it with color pencils or such, to make sure I'm paying attention to tonal variations across colors.

That's all I can think of at the moment. Hopefully you'll find it in some way useful, or not. These things help me a great deal, personally, but artwork is a greatly personal thing.