Greasyi pretty much covered what I'd say:


And hoboy, it's good to see this thread back up and running lately. :)

Probably not wise to answer a four-month-old question, but what the hell ^^

Now I don't have any advice to give beyond my own personal technique - it's not for every style, but maybe you can take some tips and apply it to your own. Here's a recent post to use as example (Not a bad choice considering how much hair there is to look at here):

hypnohub.net/post/show/41...femsub-long_hair-mezzberr

I've still got some room to grow as far as drawing voluminous hair accurately (as in shape and lineart), so let's mostly skip over that for now. Assume you're working with a simple head of straight hair.

First, you need to pick your tones. Start with your base color, then pick at least two darker tones and one lighter (if your base color is already pretty dark, do the opposite: one darker and two light). Unless you are really going for a thick darkness or washed-out image, never go full black or white when picking tones or colors. I used to keep my colors and tones on a layer of swatches, but anymore I make a fresh layer and do a quick painting over the lineart and hastily lay in the tones all over so I have a better idea of the overall relation of colors - you can turn this layer on and off any time you need to pick your colors again.

Now, laying in colors requires a different approach for different things. Take skin tones - I get the best results when I lay in the base color first, then brush in the shadows and highlights overtop. With hair, I always lay in the darkest tones first. Doesn't matter if the character has gleaming platinum blonde hair; darkest first. With hair and all its nooks and crannies, it is so much easier to just build lighter tones up from the darkest tone. It took me a long time to internalize this lesson, but it really does achieve the best results and saves you a lot of time and frustration.

Once that's blocked in, pick your second-darkest tone. Select a hard round brush (the hard round is very important), set the opacity to 100%, but make sure to have pressure on for both brush size and opacity. You want these colors to be thick, but you also want just enough transparency that you can see through your marks when they overlap. Following these steps will give you nice hair texture with little effort once you start brushing in the lighter tones.

Now, before brushing, get a good idea of your light source. Conceptualize building your tones around the areas where the light will be hitting strongest, because that's exactly what you want to do: build them one layer at a time. You'll want your base color to shine through fairly liberally once you get to it, but don't completely wash out the darker layers either. The most important thing is to keep each tone on a separate layer until you are completely done with the hair.

So, you've got your hard round brush set just right and your second-darkest tone selected. Pick a fairly slim brush size and a spot you want to lighten, and start making marks. Let them flow freely, they don't have to be exact - you want them layered and overlapping each other to give good texture and depth. All you need to do is make sure they stay in line with hair contours and flow with the path of the hair. When you make these lines, make them a little longer than how you want them to end up.

Now that you've got your tone lines marked in, you want to tidy up the ends. Switch to a soft round eraser and gently erase the tips of your lines - this will blend them nicely into the tone below. This step is also why its absolutely essential to do each tone on a separate layer - you wouldn't be able to use the eraser in this fashion otherwise. When in doubt, make a new layer.

Then you just repeat the process with each lighter tone in sequence. the length of your marks should be getting gradually smaller with each lighter tone - you want to make sure each underlayer shines through. Use your lightest tone very minimally - shouldn't be more than a thin line across the head of hair.

Once you've finished marking in the tones, step back and look at the hair as a whole. I personally have a lot of trouble seeing the forest for the trees, especially with longer hair. In the pic I referenced, there were a lot of lighter tones and highlights further down the ponytail that I had to go back and erase because they detracted from the overall shadows of the hair. I can't speak for most artists, but I can definitely say for me that the eraser is just as vital a tool as the brush in my digital art.

Hopefully that helps and gives you some ideas :-) Obviously a video tutorial would be better, but I'm still not very savvy with that type of stuff. One day I'll get there.

Well, I could always use help drawing hair... Unfortunately I've never received an explanation I've fully understood, and this is no exception, sorry x.x But that's not you're fault Mezz, I'm just pretty dumb when learning this stuff.

The only advice I've ever heard about hair that I've understood is the simplest: treat hair like it's pieces of ribbon. Beyond that I just kinda pfutz with shades and highlights and hope for the best XD

I completely understand; with every paragraph I wrote, I was thinking to myself 'a video would be so much more effective.' I'm a slow learner myself, and visual learning trumps text learning any day of the week. Sadly I'm a dunce when it comes to streaming and vid editing, but I'll learn one day.

And you're right about treating strands of hair like ribbons, though that's not 100% accurate - it'll end up too flat if you take that advice to the extreme. You want to make sure the bends and folds have a little thickness to them. I seem to do more wavy hair than straight, and I would describe drawing strands as a series of crescent-moons connected in a flowing pattern. I think that's why I gravitate to wavy hair; it gives me an excuse to hide subtle hypno-spirals in the tips of the strands ^^

Honestly, if your profile pic is any indication, I think you've got the lineart of wavy hair down very well :-) And the only thing I would change about the tone / volume is just to make the whole right side of her ponytail dark and eliminate those base-tone glimmers.

Ahh, I have those light to represent light reflections. I, with my limited knowledge of how shading works, pretty much just put reflected light on the edge of every shadow area XD It's probably not correct, but I don't know any better.

Well, it's not really a 'this is right and that is wrong' observation, just a personal preference. I've still got a lot to learn about light sourcing myself ^^ Just speaking from experience, I know that hair can lose its volume if you go too far with details and highlights. On that Aisha pic I just posted, I had to go back and darken / erase a lot of highlights further down on the ponytail because they were detracting from the overall shadows; forest for the trees and all that. I wouldn't recommend going in and altering your image in question over this - just something to consider for future works.

But, I would think that adding light reflections would add more volume to the form? Like, if I hadn't added those highlights, I feel like that side of the hair would look really flat. I dunno, maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong, wouldn't be too surprising XD

It depends. I went through a phase where every inch of a character had to have some light reflections hugging the lineart because I thought it would make them really pop; they ended up looking like oiled-up mannequins, even when I wasn't going for that particular fetish ^^.

Nowadays, my general rule of thumb is this: don't add highlights unless you have light shining on the area, and don't add backlight glows unless you have actual backlight. It really helps keep me from overdoing things - I tested some backlight highlights around the legs and arms in that Aisha pic, but ended up erasing them because I felt they were too detracting and there wasn't strong enough backlight. In the case of your image, I can't say one way or another how you should detail that area of hair because you don't have a definitive background. For all I know, there very well could be some faint light shining on the right side of her head. So that really is up to you and your artistic choice.

But something else to consider - think of a graphic novel that only uses stark black and white, like Sin City. I used to draw that way myself, and might again dabble in that style someday. Think of how much depth the image conjures with just two simple tones. So by that rationale, the darker your darks and the lighter your lights, the more volume you can coax out of an image. Now this is hard to do in cel shading, because you don't want your light and dark tones going too far from the base. So in order to maximize volume, you would want your shadowed areas to be as dark as they can possibly be given your choice of tones.

I'm really just tossing ideas out here. I've still got a lot to learn myself, and I'm not a great teacher and an even worse student ^^; But hopefully something I said resonates (and even more hopefully it's actually correct), and it can help you in future works :-)

Knowing me, it probably won't, but I appreciate the effort, and your advice is likely to help at least someone reading this thread.

Well, if you ever want to send me any WiPs, I'd be happy to offer some feedback :-)

I've made some changes to that Patchouli pic and progressed with the series. All I need now is her post-conversion beauty shot and then the whole thing will be sketched out.

sta.sh/226njcx79ehx

Not looking for any specific critiques, but any suggestions while it's still in the sketch stage are welcome~

I think they're looking great so far :-) Only minor issues I can see are: In #3, the heel looks a little too short, I'd raise that line up a bit. Also, if you feel like refining the foot, the toes shouldn't all be the same length like that. I think in this case you can get by with just lowering the pinkie and 4th toe. In future works, visualize the toes on a sloping curve at the end of the foot where the big and 2nd toe are roughly the same length and the other toes get exponentially shorter.

In #1, her fingers look a little too stiff all lined up together, especially for the context of this situation. Try spreading them out a bit (including the thumb) and maybe curl the pinky and ring finger in a little tighter. The good news is you've already got a good form to the hands and fingers, so you just need to slightly alter their positions.

Here's a (very rough) mini-tutorial I whipped up for how to do those toes, in case you're interested:


sta.sh/025ob81p3abm

Much easier to do this with visual reference. I might try and do one of these for the hair later on.

Okay, I attempted to fix her hands/feet in those two pics. I think they look better now.

sta.sh/226njcx79ehx

I also went ahead with the finale shot, so lemme know what ya'll think of her corrupted form. I plan to ink and color this set sometime, and possibly do a sequel involving Sakuya.

OH GOD THATS FUCKING HOT

FUCK I WANT IN ON THAT

all of them look great : )

However, in the Pachouli3 image (the one where she's kneeling down) Her foot does look a bit smaller than it should. I would say increase the size. Besides that, fantastic work.