Well here is a video that i recorded while drawing. I have sped it up because this one took me around 2.5 hours. Watch it and ill explain a couple of things once you’re done.

Tools Used:

-Pencils 5h,2h,6b

-Kneaded Eraser

-Mechanical Pencil 0.5(2b)

-Eraser Stick

-Color Shaper

-Stylus

Lone Wolf Pencil Drawing

The image above is a closeup of this drawing. You can see the hair detail and how the indentations look up close. It not only gives the hair a bit much more realism and textures, but also a unique look that will separate it from other pencil drawings. Remember that this is a miniature so this is a close up of a tiny area of the drawing, about 1″x1″.

Look at the flow of the hair, the indentations are not straight, they criss-cross each other giving a more realistic look. If they were straight they would just look weird and unnatural. After studying other images of animals hair you will understand the flow of hair on the face, body and other parts. This understanding will greatly improve your drawings. Like I’ve mentioned before, you can’t draw what you don’t know or understand. You’ll be surprised that most animals have the same flow of hair on the face. The only difference might be the thickness of hair or color, of course shape of the head will also make a difference. Study different images and you will understand what i mean. The main focus on this drawing is the wolf of course, the trees and sunset in the background are mostly to give the drawing more impact. Well i hope you enjoy this drawing and if you have any questions please contact me. This drawing is for sale right now, so if you’re interested you can find it here.

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

Before we start we should first see the difference between a cat and a person’s eye. One thing we can agree on is that they are used to see and basically thats where the similarities end. When talking about size, in relative to the head, a cat’s eyes are much bigger than a persons. This reason is because cats its bigger size is helpful for them to see at night. Their pupils are usually elliptical in shape and open up much wider than a pupil in a person. Another big difference is that you can barely see the sclera in a cat’s eye, their iris are much bigger. The size in their iris is what makes drawing their eyes so interesting. There is so much area to add detail and it gives the drawing so much life when you add the right effects. Here is a picture that shows the main differences between a cat and person’s eye.

Ok lets start. The first thing that you need to do is to have the outline drawn. You probably drew it and don’t know to go about adding the detail to it. Well the main focus will be on the highlights and shadows on the iris.

Tools used:

• 2b 0.5 Mechanical Pencil
• 2h Wood Cased Pencil
• Stylus
• 4b Progresso Pencil
• Kneaded Eraser
• Color Blender
• Smooth Bristol Paper

Well, negative drawing is basically drawing without actually drawing. Its drawing something by drawing around it. for example, look at this image.

The white square is drawn negatively and the black square is drawn positively. The white that you see would be the paper that you are drawing on. It was drawn by drawing around the shape of the square leaving the area white. The white area is the negative space. In negative drawing the white space is not erased, its created by drawing around it.

The correct method for negative drawing is to observe the shapes formed around or in between object(s). Once you understand the shapes you begin shading the area around these shapes revealing the negative space. Drawing the outline first and then shading outside the outline is not negative drawing. Positive drawing is the opposite of this, which is what most of us do to draw. We draw the outline and we draw in the detail, this is positive drawing.

The image above was drawn by shading around the shapes without drawing the outline first. This could easily be blades of grass overlapping each other. But this is just the outline, you can then add the detail to suggest overlapping blades . Once you have the shape you are looking for, you can add detail or in the case of whiskers, they can stay totally white.

This technique is incredibly useful when you want to create different effects. Its great when drawing whiskers and grass. Here are more examples of negative drawing, these are simple but they show basically what negative drawing is.

I use negative drawing often in my drawings, especially for drawing realistic animal hair. In the image above, the drawing with the three lines was created using the stylus tool that i have, a pen with no ink. I used the pen to indent on the paper leaving white lines, then i passed the pencil over and it left a clean white line. This is a technique that is great for hair texture and highlights. I will explain it with much more detail when i do the hair tutorial.

Exercise

Here is an exercise for you to work on, look at the image above and draw the green leaves using negative drawing. Shade the area outside of the leaves, so that you’re left with the shape of the leaves,the negative space. If you need some help you can look at the image below to see what areas need to be shaded to get the negative space. If you have any questions, please comment or contact me.

Negative Drawing