Tips On Pencil Portrait Drawing – Drawing Hair
Rendering hair is dictated by several factors: the type of hair, its hue, texture, amount, the arrangement and styling of the hair, the personality and mood of the model or the photograph, and the light effect upon the hair.
The arabesque of the hair is part of the overall arabesque. A correct arabesque is essential to the likeness of the hair. Many novice draftspersons begin with the face and grow outward from there. This is however a bad approach and instills bad habits that will prove difficult to overcome.
In fact, the arabesque is especially essential when draw a hairdo. Attempting to draw the hair working from the inside out, bit by bit, is a recipe for failure. The hair will result in being either too small for the head or too large.
Drawing within the arabesque of the hair, first put in the main darks. These darks are best seen by squinting down your eyes until an overall pattern of light and dark is seen.
Next, you need to blend the graphite in a painterly fashion following the overall gesture and movement of the hair. For this you can use your fingers, a tissue, or a paper stump. If you use a paper stump be cautious not to dull the look. If you use your fingers make sure they are dry and also wipe them constantly with a paper towel.
Then, use your kneaded eraser like a loaded paint brush to pick out the relevant lights. Do not be overly picky here. A more virtuoso approach effects a sense of life and rhythm into the hair. If you make a mistake just blend the graphite again with your fingers or stump and do it again.
Sometimes when you block-in the hair other light parts of the head pop out. This is one reason why sketching the head as a whole is necessary.
French braiding is a attractive hair style, but extremely complicated and hard to draw. The intent is to draw these French braids fluidly and with movement. A balancing act is required here: the intricacy of the hair’s styling is best handled by first line-sketching the main locks and braids. As you lay out the braids be sure to plumb and carefully measure and place each important lock and braid.
When sketching from a photograph there is the temptation to reproduce it down to the smallest detail. You may or may not give in to this temptation but you should always make sure that the hair keeps its liveliness. However, in most cases, you will not need to sketch every detail.
Further block-in the darks taking into account the bearing and motion of the relevant locks of the hair. The most difficult thing is to refrain from plunging into an region of detail. Not to do this requires mental discipline. Best is to follow a layered approach that progressively stacks the arrangement of the hair, lock by lock.
You also should soften the edges of the hair line so that it blends into the forehead and sides of the face. Hair does this naturally.
Make sure you used sharp pencils because dull pencils lead to dull, lifeless hairdos.
Having first mapped out and hatched-in the relevant locks of hair makes the sketching of the finer areas much easier, but is still labor intensive. You should be prepared to spend quite a lot of time on a hair.
Also, step back from the sketch to maintain an overview of the principal light/dark pattern because detailing can result in a flat mess in which the values close in on each other.
Restrain yourself from sketching bangs too early in the process. This helps ensure that the hair and flesh can be unified into a coherent sense of spirit.
Rendering hairdos so that it reads naturally and has a rhythmic gesture is difficult. Generally it takes as much time and effort to render the hair as it does the face and neck. You must spend as much care in prepping the hair as you would for the remainderof the portrait. If you draw from a model make sure you do the hair before your model takes a rest because the hair will very likely have changed when the break is over. The idea, then, is to devote a whole 20 to 30 minutes of a pose segment to the hair.
With these instructions you can be sure that in time your drawn hairdos will look authentic and energetic. Do not forget that sketching hair takes time so that you do not get impatient.
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Remi Engels is a pencil portrait artist and oil painter and skilled drawing teacher. See his work at graphite pencil portraits.
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