Drawing hair in Illustrator CS

talk design
1

Hi everyone!

I’m trying to illustrate the picture of Orlando Bloom where he acts as Legolas in LOTR. I’m having trouble in illustrating his long blond hair. I’ve used Dry brush, Tapered Sharp brush and Charcoal brush to illustrate his hair but still didn’t get the effect of his long fine streaks. Hope someone can give me suggestions or any useful links to Illustrator tutorials in drawing hair.

Thanks!!

I’ve attached what I’ve got so far…

2

post up what you got so far, it will give a better idea of the look you are going for…

3

i guess it may not fit your style, but i find that with hair it’s often best to have no stroke, and to actually just manually define a lot of little strands… complex paths, but it has a pretty cool look to it.

4

yeah i would agree iLikePie, depending on your pic sometimes a stroke dosent do it justice, and a small ,sharp, vector fill works well, you could also use a gradient mesh for the whole hair, and have the point around that streaks close together to get that sharp look while still having the effect of the surrounding colour blend in.

5

yeh check out www.superlooper.de

sometimes it its best to have flatter hair… kit is the person you need to speak too

6

I think that flat-ish color areas can give enough of a good hair day:

7

It really depends on your style of drawing, to be honest.

When I do my stuff, I keep the outlines in the final piece since I generally colour in Photoshop. So I have to make sure that all the strokes etc I use look good. From what I can see, you won’t have to worry about that, as you’re not keeping outlines. Therefore it’s probably not all that relevant which brush you use for the shapes.

Personally, I’d do it in layers. Find the predominant colour in his hair, and make a base layer that covers the whole hair area with that. Then gradually pick out the high and lowlights with lighter / darker colours, building up the shapes. Don’t try to do a huge shape all at once, keep them small and group them - it generally works out better and easier to control that way. :slight_smile:

That’s if you’re doing it with flat colour, of course. You can always use gradients as in the picture above, which looks great too. But I think that if you follow that route, you have to use gradients elsewhere too, not just in the one place. So on the above piccy, there’s gradient in the hair as well as the shirt and background. In my opinion, it wouldn’t work anywhere near as well if it was confined to just one area.

8

thanks for the replies…and thanks kitiara for the tips…actually i’m new to illustrator especially in drawing people…i welcome any comment to further improve my skill

thanks again!!