First thing i do when i start to draw hair is see the direction that the hair will be flowing. This is important because the hair will follow the contours of the face or body structure.

Tools Used:

• 2b Mechanical Pencil
• 2h Wood Cased Pencil
• Kneaded Eraser
• Hi-Polymer Eraser
• Color Blender
• 4b Progresso Pencil
• Stylus
• Canson Bristol Vellum Paper

Before we start the drawing i want you to know that results will only come from practice and if in the end yours doesn’t look like mine don’t worry about. I want you to understand the concept behind it and by practicing you will see results and find better ways to improve it. This is a technique that i have been working for a while now and im still looking for ways to make it better. Part of drawing is experimenting and should be enjoyable. If you practice these two things you will see results and improvement.

Step 1

Before we start i would recommend that you read this tutorial if you haven’t done so, Drawing Realistic Hair With Pencil Part One. It gives a brief introduction on the technique that will be used here. Well this will be the outline we will be working with. It measures approximately 5 inches in width. One thing about size, the bigger the drawing the more detail that you can add to it. For the outline I used 2b mechanical pencil for a light outline, don’t press too hard, it should be just dark enough for you to see it. It doesn’t have to look perfect, this tutorial will mostly focus on technique. We could have used any shape or object to cover with hair, but a cat is much more recognizable.

Step 2

We will add the whiskers in this step. Take your stylus, in my case i used a pen with no ink. Make sure the pen has ABSOLUTELY NO INK!!!! The best way to add them is to quickly run the pen along the whiskers lines that you drew in step one. If they don’t align exactly, don’t worry. As long as you’re able to put them down straight, you can add around six. Once you have them down you will reveal them using your 2h pencil. Run over the area with your pencil, holding it at around 30 degree angle. This will cover the area but not the indented lines. With your color blender you will blend the pencil that you put down. This will smooth it out, just make sure not to go over the white lines with the color blender. If you think the lines are too thin, you can erase the shaded area and thicken them by going over the line with the pen again.

Step 3

We can now start to add the outline for the cat hair. This should be random, but it should not be straight. Let me explain, hair grows in different directions at different lengths. If you just go in one direction, it wont look right and will look weird. You can test it out on a separate sheet of paper and see how it looks when you put down the lines straight. This the pattern i use. I drew it in pencil so you can see the pattern but you would do this using the stylus. There shouldn’t be any space between the lines, its best if they overlap as this would give it much more depth. The flow of hair is from the top left and curves down to the right. The layers of hair that is labeled on the above image are layers of hair that are overlapping each other. The dark parts are the spots where the thick whiskers are growing from. So these dark sections are created from the whiskers and the shadows from the hair above. To get this effect indent some lines with the stylus and outline the tips. The image on the right shows the top layer and the bottom layer. The lines that you see will be making will of course be made with the stylus. You would first indent the first layer, then using your progresso 4b pencil outline lightly just the tips. This will make the tips show. Now starting from where you outlined the top layer you start to indent the second layer below and you outline the tips. You keep doing this until you have the number of layers that you’d like. Now using your color blender pull the dark layers down over the layer below, this will give a shadow effect. Now where the whiskers are growing you would make it a bit darker just like the image above.

Now that we have that whisker section out of the way we can now start to indent the hair above. Randomly make the lines and after you have covered the area you lightly run your 4b progresso pencil over the area. This will reveal the hair, it should look like the image above. The section below the nose is drawn the same way except that it is not covered with 4b but 2h. Darken the area between the nose and the cheek. This area is darker because this is where hair comes together and since hair is going in different directions it creates more shadows. You will also darken the area where the hair starts under the nose. After outlining these areas, you can use your color blender to pull down some shadows like the image above.

Like ive mentioned before drawing hair/fur is not about actually drawing each and every hair. Its about fooling the eye into thinking its hair. How do we do this? Well the main things that jump out at you when you look at hair are the highlights and shadows. These 2 things combined make up hair. If you look at a up close photograph of some hair/fur you will see hair strands, but you will also notice that they are not all visible as single strands. Strands of hair clump up, these clumps depending where the light is hitting will cause shadows. Understanding light and shadows in hair will improve drawing hair dramatically.

Something else that you will notice is that hair is not all pointing in the same direction. Hair flows in different directions, even with short hair. Most people when they draw hair straight down which ends up looking like spaghetti, it has no flow.

So how do i draw hair. Well, the idea of giving the illusion of hair with lights and shadows hasn’t changed from when i started drawing. What has changed are the tools that i use to get that effect. I’m always looking for ways to fool the eye into seeing realism. The process that i take to draw hair is to first look at the type of hair that ill be drawing. Drawing short hair is totally different from the steps taken to draw long hair.

Negative Drawing is a big part of drawing hair and i recommend that you first understand what im talking about before going on. You can read the article here. The way i draw hair is a combination of negative drawing and scratch board. Scratchboard or scraperboard is a technique where drawings are created using sharp knives and tools for etching into a thin layer of white China clay that is coated with black India ink. Instead of a board i use paper and instead of knives i use an empty pen and needle. It sounds simple but its not just about scratching/indenting on paper. That’s why i said it is important to understand hair or else you’ll end up with realistic looking spaghetti hair with this technique

The tools that use are a pen with no ink and a pen with a needle inserted on the tip. You can see them here . Make sure that the pen has absolutely no ink, you don’t want to be halfway through your drawing and accidentally make a pen mark, trust me its not a good feeling . Also, make sure that the needle that you use on your other pen should not be too pointy. You can file it down using some sandpaper, but don’t make it flat or it will make a sharp edge. If its too pointy it will eat through the paper. The needle is a bit more dangerous to use because if you use too often on a single area it can start to shred the paper. I use the needle mostly for fine hair specially around the tips.

Ok, you now have your pen and your needle, now were ready to test it out. I recommend using a thicker drawing paper such a bristol. Not only because they work well with pencil but because the indenting stylus works great on it. I use bristol vellum and bristol smooth for my drawings. Vellum has a bit of texture to it. Ok, take your pen and draw three parallel lines, youwont be able to see them but they’re there. Now take some pencil and run over the lines. When revealing lines don’t use a mechanical pencil because the lead tip is real thin and will be able to go between the lines. I use a progresso pencil which is ticker and will easily go over the lines without going in them, just don’t press too hard. Voila, magically the lines appear.

Now take the pen and do the same but this time cross hatch them. Make lots of lines. Now run the pencil only over the top. This will outline the tips of the lines. These lines could easily be the top of some fine hairs. If you read the negative space article you will clearly notice that these lines are done using negative drawing.

Now what else can we do for more realism, well we can shade them to give the much more depth and give the effect of shadows covering some hairs. Taking your color blender, blend from the top down. This will pull the graphite from the dark area down. After you have done this, lightly run some pencil over some parts of the bottom area with your progesso pencil. This will outline some the indented lines The areas that are covered with pencil could represent space behind the the hair or darker hair that is below the lighter ones. Youre beginning to see what can be done with this technique.

Remember i mentioned that hair clumps up. Well we can get that effect by just erasing some dark lines between two strands using your kneaded eraser. This will give the effect of more than one hair together. Small details like these will give your pencil drawing much more realism. I suggest you play around and see what you can come up with.

Well this should be a good introduction and the basics on how i draw hair and fur. Next tutorial i will give an example on how you can use it on different types of hairs. We will draw the area around the nose of a cat,including whiskers. If you have any questions please contact me or leave a comment. I don’t want to continue on because i want to take my time with this topic since it can be pretty long and i want you to understand it really well. Ill leave you with a little homework Look at the image below and draw it using what i just showed you. There is no better way to improve than to practice and this should be a good start. Part 2