How to Draw Realistic Hair Step By Step By EdgarsArt

Many many people are having difficulties and are struggling when it comes down to drawing realistic hair. I cant say even for myself that i know the right and exact way how to do it, but today i will share some tips and advices from my own experience through the years.
When you are drawing hair(male or female) it is very crucial to pay attention to the details and commitment is required. Many people lose their patience in the process and in the end the result is far from what was expected.

To show how to draw realistic hair i am using my latest portrait drawing. A head of hair contains many shades, so before you start making any hard pencil strokes, you have to take some time to determine where the light is coming from and how it will affect the tonal value of the hair.
Firstly i started to make medium hard strokes using 2B pencil. At first you don't have to make hair look dark, even if they are in reality. That is because if you have to make some parts darker later, you will be able to do that in a second, but if you start by pushing the pencil to its maximum at the very beginning, than later you wont have any contrast whatsoever, and an eraser wont help either at this point.


Here you can see some strokes are obviously darker-When i was finished with drawing the basic shape with 2b, i than took 4b pencil, and just made another harder strokes on top of what i had. I had a reference photo for this, so i was making the contrast of the hair as similar as i could to the original photo, but if you are drawing with just your imagination, than you can chose different sides where to make hair look darker. Actually contrast is almost 50 proc of the secret i think. With the right contrast, the drawing gets that realistic feeling.


Here in the closeup you can see that the end of each pencil stroke looks sore and in no way realistic. So after you have made some contrast, you have to work on those another 50 proc. In the next photos i will show how i am making those hard strokes look like real hair!



Here it looks completely different from the one before doesn't it? At this point i used 2H pencil. Its a very hard, but light enough. I make really light strokes with it, without any pushing in the end of every stroke i did with 2b. That made that illusion, that the hair are lighter in the end, and it goes from lighter at the bottom, to dark and the top.
What i also did was-I used a simple synthetic painting brush and shaded everything. That gave a little bit blurred effect, which therefore makes the whole thing look half as realistic as before.
It may feel very scary at first. Only the thought of how many strands of hair there are on human head, can discourage you from thinking that you are able to draw something like this even close enough to real. I clearly didn't even make extra effort to make this detailed as possible. But after shading and smudging everything with a brush, it seems like i spent hours and hours of drawing this, but around 2 hours and this part was done.


I will include a link to my verification post, that all of the drawings posted here are done by me: https://steemit.com/art/@edgarsart/edgarsart-original-art-now-verified
More of my art you can find on my twitter page: https://twitter.com/EdArtDrawings