The most important thing to understand for drawing hair is that it’s futile to try to draw all the individual hairs on a person’s head. You may have seen drawings in which the artist seems to have meticulously drawn a head of hair in very fine detail, but if you look closer you’ll find that the artist has merely created the illusion of having drawn each and every hair. To create this illusion yourself, ignore all those thousands of separate shafts of hair and concentrate instead on the major shapes in the body of hair.

You must see the hair in this simplified way before you can draw it this way, however, so a good way to begin is to close one eye and squint while looking at your model’s head. What do you see?

Is it one distinct outline containing an even distribution of mass? Or is it a major shape with several smaller shapes protruding from it? Or is it a roughly consistent series of waves?

Also, don’t just note the positive shapes but the negative ones, too. Are there any significant gaps in the hair? Where are the major shadows? Answering these questions at the beginning allows you to bypass all the superfluous details and go straight to what’s most useful for you as an artist.

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