I finally got my character's hair to look right after watching a random YouTube tutorial

I was stuck for a week trying to make this wavy hair look natural, not like a plastic wig, in my portrait piece. The tutorial said to use a textured brush for the base and then a smudge tool set to 'color burn' on a low flow, which actually gave it depth and movement. Has anyone else found a specific brush setting that fixed a texture problem for them?

3 comments

3 Comments

eric_ramirez673mo ago

A week on hair in a drawing? Man, I just don't get that level of detail. It's a picture, not a real person. If it looks like hair from a few feet away, good enough. All that smudge tool talk sounds like overthinking it to me.

loganhart3mo ago

Yeah, the "smudge tool talk" is usually about digital painting, not drawing... it's a whole different thing. When you're painting on a screen, you're building up layers of color and light, like an oil painting. Getting hair to look soft and real means blending those layers just right. For some artists, that careful blending is the whole point of the piece. It's not about seeing it from a few feet away, it's about getting lost in the details up close.

matthew_owens915d ago

Man, my buddy Dave does this exact thing. He spent like 10 days on a single painting of a girl with this long red hair, just getting the strands to look right. He showed me the file where he had like 50 layers just for the hair. I was like man that's crazy, but when you zoom in on the print it actually looks like individual hairs, not just a blob of color. I still think it's a lot of work for something most people wouldn't notice, but he was proud of it.