How To Draw Braids (And Other Protective Hairstyles) | Easy Digital Drawing For Beginners

Hi youtube welcome back to my channel, and if this is your first time, then welcome so today i finally have a second hair tutorial for you. I previously did how to draw afro hair, and today i want to show you how to draw different protective hairstyles. So we'll do three different protective hairstyles. These kind of styles can be a little bit trickier because they require more detail or more attention to detail, but i'm going to show you some little tricks that i use that help me to draw these styles easier. I used to hate drawing hair, but after practicing a couple little tricks just to make it easier for myself. It has helped a lot. So i'm just going to show you how i do it so i'm starting off the same way that i usually start when i'm about to do a drawing i'm going on pinterest and i'm looking for a reference image of box braids. That'S what i want to draw right now, i want to draw braids. Braids are tedious. Braids can be difficult to draw, but once you get the hang of it, it's really just about following a pattern. It'S so much easier. So i'm just looking for a side profile to see how the braids fall. This is good enough um. So the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to draw out the scalp pattern. You know how, when you get braids, they part your hair and it creates a scalp like a pattern. I'M going to call it a scalp pattern, so i'm going to draw that little grid, like scalp pattern, to separate where these braids are going to land. Mind you, this is just a sketch, that's going to be kind of like guiding where we will be going into details with the braids. So next i'm going to just take the brush and thickly outline how the braids are going to fall so that i know where they land and the movement that they're going to follow. Before i go in with details and then i'm going in one more time. Just to outline the braids so that i can also show what braids are going to be on the top layer and then what braids are going to fall behind. So i'm outlining the top layered braids first and then i'm gon na go and outline the braids. That will fall underneath them. This is gon na help when i'm going in with the detail of the braid okay. So to start the braid off, i'm going to start by creating like that little knot right at the top of the braid, and i do that by drawing sort of like a teardrop shape and then from there. I can start working on the bright pattern. I don't know how to describe this shape that i'm drawing, but it's also another teardrop, but it's over or it's underlapping, the first teardrop and you're gon na kind of keep creating these twisted teardrops. Once the pattern starts to form you get into this flow of just knowing one curve another curve, you know if you need to draw a skeleton underneath to match the pattern you go ahead. I'Ve done it so many times now that now i kind of just know like a little curve. This way a little curve that way a little curve. This way a little curve that way and then to finish off the braid, i'm just going to round off the end, make it look like it's curving in or tucked in somewhere, and then i'm just going to add the hair from the root know where you pull The hair up together for the braid, now that we have the line drawing of the braid pattern. We can go ahead and fill in our hair with a i'm just going to pick like a neutral like black color, so that i can do like. I did in the last video and provide shadows and highlights as well so for the shadow i'm going to pick a color that is slightly darker than the hair, but not darker than the outline. The outline is black and the highlight i'm going to pick something. That'S slightly lighter than the hair as well and from there we're going to go in with our shadows, adding dark like streaks to either end of these little knots. That'S what's going to make them pop, so you want to look at this like it's three-dimensional. The part of the hair that is receding, that's going away from you, that's going further away, is getting darker, and in this sense, so we want the middle of these knots to pull forward and we want the edges to pull back. That'S how we know where to put the shadows and for the highlight you're just going to do the opposite. I just do like squiggly lines in the middle. That is where the hair is pushing forward. It'S coming towards us. It'S catching the most light um. It kind of reminds me of like cartoons how they draw streaks of hair. They just i don't know some squiggly lines, i'm sure i've seen it before. I didn't make this up and then look when you like step back. Look at the way that the the parts of the braid, where we added the light and shadow look at the way it pops versus, like the part of the braid without any or the part of the braid, with only shadow and there you have it. We did a braid congratulations, i hope it came out nice and if it didn't try again keep practicing practice makes perfect, but there you go, that's how you do a braid, so, instead of finishing the whole head, because it's going to take forever. I figured that i'll. Just move on to the next strand and we'll start working on how to do um twist, so we're going to start the same way that we started the braid we're going to start with that knot that tear drop shaped knot and then from there. What you're going to do is follow kind of like an s pattern um, i don't. How would i describe this shape? I guess this shape is kind of like little pieces of toothpaste or little leaves little leaves, but you're gon na keep. Following that s pattern to make it look like the twists are kind of wrapping around describing it is kind of hard. So i hope that at least visually um it's easy to follow and then just like with the braid we're going to fill in the color with our base color. So i made a bit of mistake here um i used the shadow color for the base color. So i'm just going to correct that before we go forward and then we are going to repeat the same steps that we did with the braid to add, shadows and highlights to the twists to make it three dimensional to make it pop make it come forward. And there you have it. That is how you do a twist um like going forward with the next couple of uh styles. It'S going to be easier now that i've showed you how to do the braid, because it's very similar, it's just more knowing how to draw how to draw the pattern of the hairstyle. The next protective hairstyle that i'm going to show you how to draw is a faux loc and this one we are not going to start with the teardrop shape this one you're, just kind of going to just draw a cylindrical shape. Um faux locs are very neat, so i keep it generally straight, but i allow some wiggle room there. You know to show like the texture, because it's hair that's being wrapped around into a lock and then i'm going to go in and add just like little um, indentations uh to add texture, to show yeah just to show like the texture and the hair strands. That'S what it is, the hair strands on the faux locs, because faux locs the direction that they wrap around it. It makes like a cylindrical. I don't explain it, but when you look at a faux loc, you want to get some of those details of the strands. Wrapping around you don't have to go into too much detail you can, if you want to, but i just wanted to do like a little just little details. Now we go ahead and we fill in the color of the faux loc and then we're going to go in again to do our shadows and our highlights, because of the shape of the faux loc. Just being like that long, like tubular cylindrical. There'S that word again shape to do the shadow. I'M just gon na run the dark lines down the sides of the faux loc. Then i'm gon na go back and add my squiggly highlight through the middle so that the middle is pulling forward and the sides are drawing back. This part is totally optional, but i thought i would go back and add some loose hair details. Sometimes faux locs can be like a little bit more messy or disheveled. They don't always have that perfect shape. So i thought i would just go back and add a little extra strands of hair all right now on to the next hairstyle locks. Please take note of the fact that locks can look so many different ways for the sake of this video, i'm just going to focus on one way to draw locks but practice try different ways. Draw sister locks draw like big thick locks. Draw messy locks draw neat locks, but for the sake of this video we're gon na focus on one um, one style of strand. I guess and we're gon na start the lock off similar to how we started off the faux loc, because in our reference photo this young lady um, it looks like she just got her locks tightened. So her roots are very neat and very like tight and then the locks loosen up at the end. So that's what we're going to try and mimic. As you can see, i've already started widening the lock and loosening up the texture of the lock to show that it's no longer tightly coiled like it was at the root, i'm keeping the roots the same for each hairstyle. Just like a really tight. You know just like a just a tight root, but locks don't always have tight roots. Sometimes the roots are looser. If, especially, if they didn't just get tightened, you're going to see, the hair is more fluffy. That will have to be for another video and we're going to fill in our shadows and highlights the same way that we did for the faux locs. Except for the highlight. Like it's gon na start off similar to the faux loc, but then, as the hair loosens up that highlight has to become more of an organic shape and for the last style. I realized that i forgot the name of this style and i called it shiny bumps because that's what i grew up, calling them uh, but i guess the proper term for them is bantu knots, so we're going to do a bantu knot. This one is so easy. You'Re really just going to draw like a little butt and then usually i just do one little knot like this, but looking at our reference photo, the knots are kind of stacked. So we're going to do that and then once you have drawn in your roots, you're just going to fill in the color with our base color, the same rule applies for how you're going to apply the shadow where um the hair is receding. You want to be darker, so that's like the center of the bantu knot and the edges of the bantu knot where the hair recedes and then when the hair comes forward, is where you're going? To put your highlights for this video, i didn't add any highlights or shadows to the roots of the hair. It'S totally up to you! If you want to do that, i'm just going to do it really quickly to show you what it looks like, but it's not necessary. I don't like the way that the bantu knot looks so i'm just gon na go back and make that bigger. But the idea behind how you draw is still the same, but you know you get to decide the size of your bantu knot. Yay you made it to the end of the video. I really hope that these tips and tricks serve to be helpful for you. I had to teach myself how to draw these hairstyles myself, because i draw a lot of black people. I draw a lot of black women and in college i was not taught how to do or how to draw black hairstyles be sure to check out my instagram. That'S where i post all of my personal illustrations, give me a follow, leave a comment. You know, let's be friends, but if you found this video helpful, please like the video and leave a comment too. Let'S talk, let me know like what other kind of videos would you like to see and this time i'm going to try not to take a year to make the video, and if you haven't already, please subscribe to my channel. I i really hope that i've earned your subscription now. Thank you so much for watching bye,