Realistic hair is an essential feature of a natural-looking portrait. Hair and facial hair are not only a key indicator of a realistic artist's skill, but it is also one of the most expressive parts of a person's body.
Perhaps because it's both so adaptable and so important to our appearance, the way we wear our hair and facial hair can reveal a lot about our character, whether we like it or not.
So if you really want to capture the essence of a person in a portrait, try starting with this easy three-step guide to drawing facial hair with additional tips for drawing facial hair.
At first glance, facial hair may seem like one of the most difficult parts of the human figure to draw, with its textures and colors. But if you learn to see it not as an endless collection of individual hairs, but as an overall unit made up of a series of shapes, you will find it much easier.
Here you'll find a 3-step demo on drawing facial hair like a mustache or beard, plus tips for drawing a believable head of hair.
Drawing facial hair in 3 steps
Create a line drawing.
Use the grid method and a pencil to create a line drawing of a nose, mouth, and mustache.
Build and blend dark tones.
When you are confident of your accuracy, carefully remove the grid lines with an eraser. Apply the darker tones with a pencil.
The mustache is created with short pencil lines going in the direction of hair growth. Blend the entire area to a gray tone with a twist, then continue to create pencil lines on top.
Deepen the tons, mix and enhance.
Continue to deepen the tones and blend the design for a smooth look. Once the mustache is dark, use a kneading eraser to remove some light hairs. This will help it look full and dimensional.
Drawing Facial Hair – More Tips
+ When you have the opportunity to draw facial hair, keep in mind that it does not differ that much from other hair. It's generally a bit thicker and sparser, though, and you'll want to pay special attention to blending around the edges. As before, avoid hard edges except in usual cases.
+ When drawing a male mouth, you may encounter facial hair such as a mustache and/or barbecue. Although it may seem difficult, it is a lot like drawing animal fur. Just like fur, facial hair is drawn using pencil lines that reflect the length of the hair. It is constructed in several sofas.
Comment Drawing, facial hair
To Draw Hair – Here are more tips
#1 Don’t chase “the hair”
A single hair is thinner than the narrowest pencil line you can draw. To create the illusion of drawing all the hair, ignore all those thousands of separate hair shafts and instead focus on the main shapes of the body of the hair. See the hair in this simplified way and then you can draw it that way.
A good way to start is to close one eye and squint while looking at your model's head. What do you see? Is it a distinct contour containing a uniform distribution of mass? Or is it one major shape with several smaller shapes protruding from it? Or is it a roughly coherent series of waves?
Note not only the positive forms, but also the negative ones. Are there any significant gaps in the hair? Where are the major shadows? Answering these questions at the beginning allows you to bypass all the extraneous details and get straight to what is most useful to you as an artist.
#2 Capture the details
Once you have identified the shapes that define the hair you want to draw, go ahead and use them to begin your drawing. Lightly draw these shapes in the correct relationship to the head so you have a context to work within, but don't expect these edges to be permanent.
Experiment a little with the arrangement and proportion of the hair, and remember that sometimes even the most realistic results don't turn out the way we expect, so really experiment with your marking.
#3 Always pay attention to lights and darkness
As with almost all subjects, establishing effective contrasts between lights and darks is one of the most important aspects of drawing hair, and the best strategy for achieving this contrast is examining the darkest areas and Shade them first.
The lighter areas are already there, in a sense, in the white space of your paper, it's best to work around them. Once you've done the darkest parts, continue to gradually shade in the lighter spots, and this way you'll be better able to keep your range of lights and darks consistent.
When working in black and white, the lightness or darkness of the hair simply depends on the evolution and consistency of its hue. Sometimes, however, bright light may fall on the hair, and dark hair in this situation may be indicated by a greater contrast between those areas and those not in direct light.
#4 Use directional strokes
For a sense of texture to your shades, use directional strokes, which anticipate both how straight or curly the hair is and give in front of individual strands. For most hairstyles, your strokes should be largely consistent, as the hair will all generally fall in the same direction, and even the smallest variations can be enough to make the hair look natural or tousled.
When you get to the outer edges of the hair, don't be afraid to let the hair fade into the background. A person's hair rarely has a harsh visual edge, and letting the viewer see the hair become thin and wispy can be a great touch of realism.
#5 A little variety but mostly the same
Although there seem to be many different hair types in the world (almost as many as there are people types), don't be intimidated by this notion. Styles can change a lot, but in all but the most extreme and artificial cases, the fundamental properties of human hair don't change much. The most visible differences are color and curl.
To draw curly hair, try using circular shading instead of one-way or back-and-forth methods, and be sure to do this from the start. It's more laborious and often time-consuming, but worth it if you want a naturally curly look.
For extremely curly hair, you may want to forgo directional strokes altogether and stick to a variety of smooth or circular shading.
#6 Don’t forget the head
Throughout the hair drawing process, always remember that there is a skull underneath. This is what gives the hair its essential shape, so pay attention to the shape of the head and how the hair naturally falls around it.
If you remember this and stay focused on the entire body of the hair instead of getting caught in each separate strand, you will draw beautiful heads of hair no matter your subject.