How to draw curly hair
This tutorial will show you how to draw curly hair in few easy steps and tune your fashion sketches with fresh, playful curls. Some outfits just don’t go well with straight hair – explore the steps and give amazing new looks to your fashion sketches!
Step 1: Before you start
Draw the face of your model with all the features. Don’t forget to draw the ears too.
Pull a short vertical line to mark the middle of the head.
Step 2: Guidelines
Starting from the Cernterline draw the outlines of the hair. Notice that the shape is indented at the top of the head. Then it follows the form of the head, expands and finishes as an arch at the bottom line.
Step 3: Layers of hair
When drawing fashion sketches you have to keep in mind that hair is not a flat surface. It has volume and layers.
Leave some space from the outline and draw a second line repeating the former. This upper layer should be longer, so the hair looks 3-dimentional.
Mark the middle part of the hair with several short, curved lines starting from the Centerline.
Step 4: Bottom layer
Erase the unnecesarry lines and draw zig-zag lines covering the bottom layer of hair. Don’t be afraid tointersect the ears – doing so will make your drawing look more natural.
Erase the parts of the ears that stand behind the bottom line of curls already.
Step 5: Upper layer
The zig-zag guidelines for this layer will be following the curve of the outline of the hair. Make at least one zig-zag in the inside of the upper layer.
Notice that the curls guidelines start from the middle part of the hair.
Step 6: A-side curls
As mentioned above, hair even in fashion sketches, has certain dimention. So does every single curl. Using the ziz-zag guide draw parallel line with curved end, as shown in the example illustration. Fill all the curls this way.
Step 7: B-side curls
Once you have filled every left-to-right part of the curls it’s time to make the B-part. Use exactly the same technique and draw all the curls.
Draw the tips of the hair thining at the end.
Step 8: Bottom line
Use wavy line to fill the gaps between the curls ends. Remember to follow the guidelines from step 2. Hair has volume- show it, leaving the upper layer slightly longer than the one that goes behind.
Step 9: How to color curly hair?
Cover the whole hair with a flat layer of color of your choice.
Then take a darker shade and render the whole A-part, except for its center.
Darken slightly the part of the hair, since the hair is always darker in the roots.
Using the same technique, but changing the size of the zig-zags you can have very different hairstyles for your fashion illustrations. Try mini, regular and big curls!
You just learned how to draw beautiful curls in an easy way. It’s time to get creative and design some hair accesories and jewelries!
It doesn’t look right! Common mistakes:
Error 1: The distance between the parallel lines is too little. Make it wider- at least 1/3 of the next zig-zag segment