Learn to Draw Caricatures - Drawing the hair

         
 
 
 

DRAWING CARICATURES

 
 
 
 

Drawing the Hair

How to protect your drawing

Long, light hair

Short hair

Time to draw the hair. Her hair is why I selected this particular face, actually. I thought she would have fun hair to draw because of it's volume and it's nice flowing shapes.

As you get more lines and shapes on your paper when drawing hair, you'll be creating a lot of dark shapes and lines all over your sheet of paper and the graphite from your pencil may start to smear as you drag your drawing hand across the paper. To combat this, take another blank sheet of paper and put it on top of your drawing and rest your drawing hand on the clean sheet. Your hand should be resting right on the edge of the clean paper so the pencil can get to your drawing. As you move around on your drawing drag the clean paper under your hand.

Get your lap desk out and clip your unfinished caricature of the woman on it and get comfortable in front of your computer. Sharpen your 5B pencil and have your eraser handy. If you have a blending tool, have that ready too. If you'd like to print out the photo we'll be working with, go ahead.

The way I draw hair is just a bunch of shapes that represent shadows in the hair. Then those shadows are enclosed by the contour of the hair. The shadows that I create in the hair are composed usually of a series of tightly packed lines. These lines are drawn to create a hair shadow shape. If it's lighter hair I'm working with, then there's lots of negative space with an occasional shadow shape thrown in. In darker hair, I usually fill the whole contour of the hair in with graphite and leave a few white areas as highlights. To make the lines and shapes I create look more like hair, I follow the direction of the way the hair is falling as I shade and draw. It's not necessary to draw each individual strand of hair, the shadow shapes do that work for you. If you draw the contour of the hair then fill in the interior with shadow shapes that indicate the direction of the hair - that should be enough to indicate to the viewer that what you have drawn is hair.

 
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