[Tutorial] How To Color Anime Hair: The Sequel

Thank you to flexispot for sponsoring today's video. It'S been proven that sitting for large amounts of time is very unhealthy, with online schooling, art playing games and doing homework. I have to constantly sit down on my desk for more than 10 hours a day. That'S not healthy, and i get constantly tired over having to be at my desk for the entire day, although with flexaspot's desk you're able to change all that, you can change the elevation in your desk to make it so you don't have to sit down while working And when you're done with it, you can always bring it back down in case you're, tired of standing up with their four key binds. You can also pre-set it to any elevation you want, so you don't have to constantly fidget around to see which one's the perfect match for you. It also has a drawer, so you can store any art supplies you have or anything. It also comes with two usb ports and a c port in case. You need to charge your device, and this thing can go really high. Here'S a comparison with my chair from its lowest setting to its highest setting. If you want to check out more flexi spots desk check out the link in my description below hey, what's up, it's me, your favorite artist, you're, obviously subscribed to and welcome back to another tutorial now this may be one of my best tutorials ever. This is a hair tutorial, the sequel. Now, why am i making a remake on this? You ask look at this. This is garbage, of course, i'm going to remake it, so i kind of want to share with you some techniques that i've learned over the past two years of you know drawing, and i really hope you enjoyed this video now. I do want to go over my brushes very quickly, so let me make a new canvas. The four brushes i'm going to be using is rough shading airbrush tool and then these two blurs right here, they're very important and i'm going to go into detail and when you should use either. I am going to put these brushes in the description. So i'm very sorry for not doing those on my previous videos, but i will be doing that for this one and then these hair highlights i'm also going to link that. But it's going to be credited to the original post, because i didn't make these highlights. It was another artist and i'm going to credit them in my description before we color, though i am going to go over some drawing tips when you're drawing hair three important tips that every artist should know. So, first of all, you don't want to draw your hair in strips like these separate lines, you know a lot of beginners do this. Of course they think that hairs and strands i'm going to draw them in strands. No, you need a you need to draw your hair clumped up, so it feels easier to like comprehend and it's easier on the eyes number two think of your hair as in bangs, side, hair and then back hair, because this helps you create unique hair to each Of your characters, so here's my characters - bangs, that's obviously the front here. The side here is going to be these things right here and then the back hair is going to be this floof all back here now. What this helps you to do is it helps you to create a clear, hairstyle and something that isn't so messy here, i'm going to open up another one of my drawings to show you here is princess peach, as you can see, it's very easy to distinguish our Hair shape, because there are the bangs, there is the side hair, and then there is the long back hair. This helps you section your hair easier, make it a little more easy on the eyes, and it helps you distinguish it helps you also like distinguish the shading you're gon na do for everything and number three all hair originates from a source line. The mistake i made was calling it a source point, it's more of a line, so you know how on your head, you have like this little like line of baldness and then all your hair comes from it. It'S pretty much the same thing hairline and then all your hair originates from that source and it's very important to do that. So it looks more a little bit realistic. Of course, if you're taking a different approach to art, you don't have to do that so yeah. Let'S get to coloring so you're first going to need a color scheme. I already have a video on how to create one and yeah. So the first thing you want to do is pretty much. Do the base color of your hair. That'S very easy to do. Even a beginner can do that and then what you want to do is alpha, lock it well now. What this does is that you can't color out the edges and that's very useful for what we want to do. Uh next thing you want to do is we're doing our first shading first shading thing, so we're going to take the second shading color and now what you want to kind of think about. Is you want to shade in like the same kind of uh y-axis? So what you want to do, what we're going to do is shade here here and here and now. Why are we doing this? Well generally, hair is kind of like uh, weird in the way it's shaded uh. It'S usually like in a gradient and these gradients kind of take like a pattern like this. The reason they do that is because since hair is always bendy, and since it's very like kind of smooth, it's going to do that. So you generally want to shade around these areas and now what you're going to do is kind of like create little points or little uh strips lines of the hair in like a pointy manner like this and now this kind of represents the hair layering. On top of each other and that's kind of important, because we need to show that there's a lot of hair in like these hair strands, and so what we're going to do is just generally just outline where the hair strands are going to be like this. The word i was trying to say is strokes by the way. So what i'm doing right now is that i'm creating general strokes uh to create the groundwork of what my details are gon na, be so like i'm just kind of like scribbling, not scribbling, but i'm just creating strokes like on the lines that i've created. So then, i can later add more details and make the strokes more sharper. So that's what i'm going to do after this step. This is pretty much our base. Is our sketch. This part may take you the longest, considering that you got to focus on like the shapes and stuff and every single element after this kind of depends on how well you do on this step. So now we're going to do is we're going to define the shape of the hair. Now, what you want to do is grab the base color and what you want to do is start making more sharper. Uh, strokes like this is supposed to kind of represent like the hair, the hair strands, so you kind of want to make sharper strokes on this part. So, unlike the last step where we did general strokes and they were kind of wide we're going to do more defined strokes and when you're doing the shape of these, you kind of want to be in the mentality of a triangle, because you know uh. These are going to be kind of wide and they need to be pointy at the edges. So, of course, the only shape that would describe is a triangle, so you want to make pointy figures, and you see you see how these are becoming more defined pieces of hair. Continue that doing that, for the top of this layer and and sometimes you can even like do just a giant stroke in the middle of it, if you don't know the kind of pattern you want to do, just kind of like just do a straight line. It doesn't even matter uh-oh, that's not what i'm meant to do and the last one we got ta do is right here and now you just want to do this for every single part of the hair so bam we barely got the middle of the hair done Now, let's do the bottom of the hair this for this one i kind of already did it because i kind of broke my steps, the process. I broke the process a little bit and now i'm gon na yeah and if you kind of feel like you made a mistake, you can always go to the second part and kind of sharpen it from upward. You can do this, you can even add, like other triangles, for the bottom, with the second shading color. Just so you feel, like you get more like uh hair. Some tips i want to give for this step is to make sure that your like strokes are very dynamic. If you make them all very, even so, like each stroke ends at the same level, it's going to look very weird and your eye is going to notice a pattern. What you need to do is be very random and be very dynamic, with the strokes you're making make some of them long make some of them very short. Make two in a row make one make them wide to make them different. Lengths didn't make them different widths. Do all that, because if you don't, then it's going to look very uh symmetrical and your eye is going to catch it and make it look very weird. Another thing you want to do is around like the bottom of the bangs. As you can see on the side here, i left the bottom part untouched, and that is because, since each piece of hair and the side hair is one just long piece of hair. We need to represent that by just smoothing out, because each of these strokes are meant to represent, like one short piece of hair layered on top of another. But since the side, hair is just one long piece of hair, then we just need to blur it out. All right now that we kind of like defined our shapes a little bit more, you might kind of feel like it's a little bit like messy. You might feel like it's a little bit too sharp and that's where the blur tools come in. So what i'm going to do is the blur tool should be used for bigger shapes, and what i mean by bigger shapes is like these bottom parts of the hair i'm going to just blur them. The reason we're doing this is to make sure that every stroke that we made is the same opacity on the bottom and it just transitions well into each other. Because if we don't you're gon na be able to see like the individual strokes that we made. And we don't want that and see they're a little bit more smooth than doubt they're, not like you can't see like the individual strokes. Everything feels like one solid, connected piece and now what the clothes blur tool is used for is to stretch colors into like another color so like, as you can see here, here's a triangle right here. What i'm going to do is kind of blur it in and out like that, so it feels like it's transitioning into the hair more smoothly. So what i'm going to do is i'm only going to do this for some of them. That i feel like are a little too harsh for my eyes. You obviously don't want to do it for each like individual triangle. You just want to do it for like the major ones. This is to make it feel, like our strokes, are transitioning more nicely into the base color next step with the clothes blur uh. You want to like take the bottoms of these middle parts, and you want to stretch them out this way now. The reason we're doing this instead of the blur tool and the regular blue tool is that we want to stretch out the colors. We don't just want to blur them. We want to stretch them out, so i'm taking this blur tool and i'm kind of like doing pushing back and pushing out like the colors so that they blur more with the bottom part. You don't want to do these with the top parts, but you want to do them with the bottom parts, and these are a little bit more major brushes sizes and now see you get a more. You know softer blending of the hair and it's not too sharp than it was before, and this kind of helps make the hair look a little bit more softer more poofy, and it generally gets rid of those two harsh strokes that you probably messed up on and Bam, we have our first shading color done now on to the next color. Now, with this color, you want to focus less on making strokes and you kind of want to focus more on. You know making outlines of those strokes and i'm going to get into that. I'M going to show you how to do it and stuff what you want to do. Take your third color rough shading and you want to start kind of outlining the strokes that you made. So as you can see here, i'm outlining those triangles i made now. You may be asking yourself it's kind of redundant that we just kind of smoothed them out and now we're kind of making them sharp again and yeah it kind of is, but you know it helps. You see the bigger picture from an early start instead of from too late. So what we're going to do is simply outline those shapes and after you outline them, you want to take the closed blur and then from like the inside of the stroke, go down, and you want to stretch these colors out down. So, like uh, pretend, like you so like put the blurb brush inside the entire stroke and just push down on it, and now what these will do. Is it's going to help you it's going to help the colors look a bit more smoother. Once again, it's going to help, you know shush colors into each other more and it's going to look more natural. You also kind of want to do it again for these parts like we did before, and it should look a lot like this after you're done, outlining and then blurring with the shade color. What you want to do is pick it again and then generally shade, and what i mean by that is like shade the hair, then, as you would with any other object. So the light isn't hitting here. It'S not hitting here it's not hitting here, and i can't really specifically tell you what the light is not hitting you just need. Like a general, you just need a general understanding of how to shade, and then you want to shade with this color, where the two like, where separate, hair, strand or hair groups meet and then once again we're gon na blur it out down just to make it Look more and you don't want to really blur these ones. You can blur them out on the edges, but, like you need to show that light is absent on these parts. So i don't really recommend blurring too much down here. So it looks more sharper. We need those sharp shadows too. We can't just forget about the sharp shadows and i'm going to kind of fix this, because i feel like it looks a little bad and then once again fix it, i'm making it go down and up and now bam. You want to do that for every single one of these uh, every single part where you did the triangles at so i'm gon na go ahead and do that now for now for areas that are already covered in this like uh in the second shading, and don't Really have like the quote-unquote triangles to them. You just want to. You know generally shade the hair with the third color. So as an example, this part's already kind of fill this part's already filled with the second shading color. So i can't really outline anything so like what we can do is just once again, i got ta take a color. We can just generally shade it like hair. We don't have to do anything specific or magical. We can just generally shade it all right now. The top of the hair sh is like one of the darkest parts of the hair. So what we're gon na have to do. Let me fix that because it's annoying me what we're gon na do is take the second color and once again, we're gon na do what we said. We'Re gon na outline the little triangles we made up here, we're gon na kind of just. You know outline everything we have up here then we're gon na blur them then we're gon na generally shade where the hair clumps meet, then for the parts that i have. No spikes on them we're just going to generally shade and now we're going gon na actually kind of just kind of fill in the middle part. With this color, the second shading color and we're gon na go we're gon na make some spikes with the first shading color that kind of lead into the middle part of the hair, and there we're done with the second shading color. Don'T do the middle part. The middle this part right here is supposed to be a little bit more subtle, and so you don't really want to do that part. These last three colors are only meant to uh exaggerate the depth of the hair. You know we're trying to make it a point of fact that the back of the hair is in the back and that the front of hair is in the front, so we're not gon na touch the spikes at all anymore. Okay, we're not gon na use. Those you're just gon na have to generally shade with these last three colors and you just need to exaggerate the depth of the hair, so we're gon na take this color and immediately we're just gon na color, the back hair, because the back hair is gon na. Be the darkest part of the hair and places that are covered the most by other layers of hair is going to be the darkest part. Other parts that are going to be really dark is where hair covers them like these parts right here and the other darker parts are going to be in the middle of these hair clumps, because these hair clamps are folding over each other. After this we're going to come back to the top part of the hair, we're going to once again fill it, but only this small part, and you want to start creating triangles that come outside of it. That should follow your previously made triangles too. So it has a sense of flow into them, and there you are done with your fourth shading color now for these last two, they should. These last two are resorted to the darkest of the dark parts of the hair. So with this fifth hair color we're just gon na these should be in the places where your fourth shading color would be, and not in all of them. So these are resorted for the darkest of the dark darks, so we're gon na go back and we're just gon na minimally put these in our darkest of the dark spots. See that's really all i needed and then for this last last color. This is only going to be in the back here. This color right here is only going to be used for the back hair. Now, what i'm going to do is i'm going to make some adjustments where these hair? Do you see these little like disconnected hair parts like you can tell this is one shape, but it's disconnected. I'M gon na make a line of the third shading color, connecting these points like that, some of them may go nowhere and i'm just still gon na add on to them. So like that, and now what i'm going to do is take the closed blur brush and i'm just going to push in the base color into them. So it feels like these lines are kind of fading into the base color. For this one too, and i'm going to do it for this one and i'm just gon na push in the color inside them this last color, you may be wondering why it kind of separates itself from these five colors. It'S because this is the indirect lighting color. This is you know this makes like the um. You know the hair look a little bit more pop flash. So what i'm gon na do with this is i'm gon na take the airbrush tool, and just color just subtly - add them to this back here and now for where cut where the darkest parts of the hairs meet so like this here, this is like one of The darkest parts of the hair, i'm going to add this color here instead actually hold up. You should apply this color only where the darkest hair color is, i'm breaking that rule very easily right now, so i'm going to add the darkest hair color to parts where i want it, and then i'm apply this indirect lighting color to those parts of the hair. I'M gon na blend it, so it looks a little bit more softer. I'M also gon na blend this upward and bam. This is our base hair color. Now some parts may look a little wonky, but we're going to fix that a lot of the steps after this are optional. It kind of depends. If you want your hair, more vibrant. If it looks vibrant enough, then you can just skip everything. I'M gon na do but um. If you don't think it looks vibrant enough, then we're gon na do these preceding steps. Now, what you wan na do is add a clipping multiply, layer and uh, depending on, like which one you, like i'm gon na, say the third one you're going to want to outline the same places where we made the spikes. So in the middle, the bottom and the top part - and once again you can change it, just alpha, lock it and just pick which color, you think looks the nicest. So no, i don't want that one and i feel like this one looks the nicest so we're going to go ahead with this one. Next, what we're going to do we're going to create another multiply layer and we're going to take this yeah we're gon na. Take the indirect lighting, color and just darken the part like the back of the hair and like parts that are like completely covered by the light so like right here. This part's completely covered by the light i'm gon na fix that i'm gon na erase a little bit here and what else is covered by the light. This part's covered by the light - and this is like just in places that it's just completely absent of light and then you're, just gon na wan na adjust the layer again. If you don't like this color, you could just use the darkest color in your hair. Just really depend on preference, i would just use the indirect lighting color and then just adjust it. So it looks like this part of the hair is behind. Now. What you want to do is create a new overlay layer and take your skin, color and just lightly gloss over the bangs. You can either use normal or overlay depending on what looks better, i'm just going to go ahead with normal and you just kind of want to add an underline to your bangs with the skin color. Now what this does is. It adds a sense of reflection against the skin color, since the light is going to be bouncing to the hair and reflecting back. You can also adjust this to where you think it looks the best. Next, if you feel, as your hair is not as vibrant as you want it, we can create a new hard light layer. Take your color and kind of make it a very saturated version of that color and right here you just want to make a big stroke of that color and once again like where the light hits. You just want to make a big stroke of that color, and this is only if you feel as if your color doesn't feel as vibrant as if, as you wanted, it so again, two strokes of lines and then adjust it to where you think it looks. The best now, what we want to do is make it add, glow layer, take your base color and make a ring on the top of the hair, and this is if your sun is like coming on top of your head and then you can adjust it to How bright you want it, i'm gon na want it like noticeably, but not too noticeable. So i think that's fine next come the highlights. Now. This is like a big part in this step. Is your art style? Now i did link a bunch of hair highlights in the description this is made by someone else, so i will get credit to them in the description. These hair highlights are very, like they're, very stylistic and like there's a bunch of different ones that you can play with my personal favorite. Is this one because it feels very harsh, and i like, like the contrast of it, so it's like completely white. That'S what i like, but, of course you can use different ones. This part step. This part of the step is very you know, stylistic so just play around with what you like. So what i'm gon na do is i'm gon na make a new normal layer and then just try to follow where this shadow is with the highlight and then try to follow the curvature of your head. If it doesn't follow it exactly we'll make it follow it. So what i like to do is i'd like to take an eraser tool and just kind of following, like the flow of the hair i like to make shapes that kind of help it because sometimes it's like it's not going to fully conform to, like the shape Of the hair, so you got to make it so you can erase some parts you can erase some parts in the middle just make sure that it follows the flow of your hair and doesn't do its own thing. Okay, now that we have our highlights, this entire part is my style. So if you want to follow my style, you can follow what i'm going to do next, but this entire part is now my style. Part of my style is that i like to outline where the light hits the most with a harsh pen. So i, like i like to outline the outer part of the hair with where light hits the most and i'm going to connect it with this part. So i'm going to do that. This part also hits a lot with the light and then over here it hits a lot with the lights and then i accidentally and boom. Now we have our highlights now i like to do the same thing, but with the indirect lighting color, not exactly the same color, but i'm going to make it a little bit more vibrant. So i'm going to use this color so now what i'm going to do is in the same way that i did it up here, where the light hits the most i'm going to do it on the opposite side of where that light hits the most again. This is my style, you don't have to follow it if you don't want to, but i'm doing this because i think it kind of like adds to the shape a little bit more and i'm going to make it follow the inside of the hair and now, for My old drawing you may be thinking: where did this old part of the lighting go, and it now conforms to this style of my hair? What i like to do is that i like to take the rough shading, and then i like to kind of scribble where the flow with the flow like and like taking in mind like the flow of the hair i like to scribble here and then what i Like to do is take a transparency brush and then just kind of like make uh arcs in the side, the hair once again taking into consideration the flow of the hair and now what i, what i now, what i'm going to do is i'm going to change The color to this color because i didn't really like the other color and then i'm going to lower the opacity a bit. So then it blurs more with the pink color and now. Lastly, i'm going to do some finishing touches. I'M going to take this highlight layer. I'M going to duplicate it and then i'm going to change one of the highlights into the second coloring layer and then i'm gon na change this to multiply now what i'm gon na do is gaussian blur this a little bit so like about right there and then Unhide my highlight layer and now stylistically, it adds to it. So now it looks like it's popping out a little bit more with it, and now i'm gon na fix something. I'M gon na do my hard light and because i feel like my hair, doesn't look very vibrant, i'm gon na add the saturated once again. The saturated, pink, i'm just gon na completely fill it with that color and then i'm gon na lower the opacity very low and then just turn it up until i feel like i'm satisfied with the color this just changes kind of like the color like. I don't feel like my color scheme kind of fit well, it was like less vibrant. So what i'm gon na do is i'm gon na add the hard light and then just change it until i'm satisfied with my color. You don't have to do this. If your color looks already kind of vibrant, i just did it because i feel like i chose like a kind of bad color scheme. So now i'm going to change this to one of these colors and now, once again, i'm going to make a new color and i feel, like i kind of lost, like my indirect color, from the complete, like a bunch of filters that i added so what i'm Gon na do is go back and just add in those indirect lighting colors into the darkest parts of the hair and by darkest parts i mean mostly like the back of the hair. You don't have to do it for places like these, because it kind of already fits in with it, i'm just doing it to the back of the hair. I also feel like this part of the hair is kind of bland, so what i'm going to do is kind of fix that color by making it more purple, and i lost my effects, i'm going to make it more purple. I feel, like it looks kind of bland over here, so i'm going to add a purple, and that is the concluding result of the hair tutorial now before this tutorial, i did have to spend some time making the initial drawing that i had to copy. So if you want to see that one for yourself here it is, i want to say thank you guys so much for 130 000 subscribers. I know i haven't made a special yet, but i just want to tell you right now that it's that i'm super grateful for everything you guys have given me, and i am so happy that i have a voice to teach other beginners about. Anime are because it was always my dream and i really like helping people, so i just want to say thank you guys and i'm very glad that i got to help a lot of people out and once again, if you like this video like subscribe comment, do Whatever you do - and i just want to say, thank you i'll see you in the next video bye you