How to Draw Hair With a Pencil

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Laura Pace I'm here at Asel Art Supply today, I'm going to give you a lesson on how to draw hair with a pencil. I used a pretty soft pencil to do this drawing. This is a three B which makes a really soft black line. First thing we need to talk about when drawing hair is you need to have an idea of the shape of the skull. Depending on how the person's face is turned because the hair really wraps around the skull. We want to draw the hair as masses of form rather then trying to draw individual hair. Individual hair drawing is pretty tedious and it really doesn't give you a good idea of what you are seeing when you look at a person's hair. So the first drawing I did here is a girl with very dark hair. And I have some mass areas that I made here that I just completely blacked in with my dark pencil. But you can also see I left some highlight light areas to show that she has kind of a sheen to her very dark straight hair. You'll also notice that I left a line right here to show the part in her hair where you can see her very light colored skin in contrast to her dark hair. And then the last thing I did is I left some individual hairs showing on the ends of her hair, some detail to give you an idea of the texture of her hair. Next I drew a girl with very light colored hair so when you are drawing with blond or white hair, you might even want to draw a shadow shape behind or around the head to give the edge of the hair some definition. We are going to kind of do the opposite of what we did on this girl with the dark hair here, because the line work on this hair is in the shadow areas. She has kind of wavy hair so I went in and drew some individual parallel lines in the areas where there is shadows on her hair. And I also drew some shadows around her face so that you can see that the mass of her hair is casting a shadow on to the edge of her face. The darker shadows in this hair are going to be on these rounded shapes at the bottom. Because they are receiving the least light from overhead. The third drawing of hair is for a person with kinky hair, hair that's finely textured but very coarsely curled. You can see on here like this you don't get a lot of contrast between light and dark. So I drew in a mass area of very dark, that's just kind of a shape. It doesn't have a lot of detail to it. And you can also see that there's a cast shadow here around his forehead where the edge of his hair kind of makes a change in direction. On the top of the hair where the light hits, there's a little suggestion of texture here which I did by making spiral lines with my pencil and the outside edge of this hair have a tiny detail of rounded lines. Instead of just being a straight line I wanted to show the kinky texture of his hair by drawing rounded lines. So that's what I have to tell you about drawing hair. I suggest you get some photographs and look at people in make observations. Practice drawing hair then you'll get good at it."