Circles Exercise

I think this short exercise is a great way to develop a natural understanding for drawing hair.

Step 1. Circles

• Draw some circles that descending from large to small, I drew some doughnuts because I was probably hungry when I was drawing these (don’t judge me LOL)

• Draw some direction guidelines that dictate how the hair will flow between the circles

Step 2. Strand

• Draw a strand of hair that flows between the circles. We drew them descending in size because wavy hair tends to have large curves towards the top and smaller once toward the bottom.

Step 3. Render

• Add shading and rendering to the hair

Wavy Hair on the Head

Step 1. Head shape

• I won’t be covering how to draw the head in this tutorial but you can check out my head drawing tutorial over here if you want help with this step ^.^

Step 2. Guideline Forms

• Draw some light guidelines (or use a different color) to block out the large forms of the hair.

• This is a very crucial step in drawing hair properly, its something we focus heavily on in my Hair Drawing Basics course. Understanding how the hair sits in 3D space is very useful when drawing semi-realistic to realistic art.

Step 3. Strands

• Start adding in strands of curving hairs. Make sure to add extra waves and curls towards the tips of the hair

• Keep adding more hairs until the large forms are filled out

• Add loose strands of hair, I like adding some strands around the ears and over the top of the forehead as I have done in the example image.

Step 4. Render

• Add shading and rendering to the hair. Feel free to skip this step if you want to only focus on the base forms before getting into shading

One thing to keep in mind when drawing hair is that it’s defining the large forms and adding the strands in that is the difficult part. Take time to practice drawing 3D forms if this feels really challenging to you because that is the foundational skill in representative art.

This mini course is designed to help you learn how to draw flowing hair from imagination. We go through a series of drawing exercises to help you develop your drawing skills so that you will be able to draw hair with ease. The worksheets provide a very clear and concise way of practicing that will get you fast results. Let’s draw some flowy hair together!