Male Hair With Adobe Illustrator

Hi everyone David pounds here I am back with another illustrator tutorial. I had a request for a video on how to do messy hair, so I'm going to be showing you techniques for that, as well as a few other styles. This is an illustration I did of my son, who famously doesn't often comb his hair, so I thought he would be a good model. As always, I want to have good reference material, so I started with a well lit photo as you can see, he's got dark, hair and there's not a lot of detail in the highlights. So I went into Photoshop and used levels to brighten up the image to draw out some of the shading and then a lighter version. Still, this lightest version doesn't help me much with face shading, but it does allow me to see some of the hair structure that I will want to draw in detail. I will say here at the outset that something like this can be tedious. The more time I take with it the more detail I put in it the better it's going to look a lot of students who try this lose patience or run out of time, and they try to do the highlights with too large or too few strokes. I'M not going to try and draw every hair, but I am going to draw in enough detail so that it looks believable. I will typically start with the basic outline of the hair. What I'm trying to do is really sell the edges, adding enough variety and wisp enos to make it visually interesting. I'M going to show you some of the techniques I use here, but there would be nothing more boring than watching me. Do the whole thing so I'll. Just focus on this section right here, I'll hit command 3 on a Mac to hide what I've already done with the pen tool. I'M going to draw sort of the big volume shapes with the basic shape completed, I'm going to come back and create some of these smaller shapes and then use the Pathfinder to add them to the bigger shape. Some artists will try to draw this outside line and then try to come back and punch out the openings, but I find that the holes don't really line up properly to make for believable strands of hair. Let'S do something about like this and then add another one. Being good with the pen tool is certainly a plus with this kind of thing I want to design it so that I like the way it looks artistically, even if the hair in the reference photo, isn't exactly in this position, I'll go ahead and fill this up. I could leave them alone, but I usually select them all along with the bigger base shape and then go to the Pathfinder and forge them all into one compound shape notice here that the openings look like they were made by overlapping strands of hair. I can also add a few more strands in an area like this drag out. A line with the pin tool then break the line back to make a sharp point at the end again, they may not really be here in the photo, but if it contributes to the end result, I'm after a bit of artistic license is allowed. Let me show you some close-ups of what I've done see here, how well the lines flow over one another with the openings. If I had gone in after the fact and tried to punch out the openings with the subtract feature of the Pathfinder, this would have not lined up well here. We see some very nice detail that really helps to create strands that sell the messiness of the hair. I can always go back in and make adjustments if I don't find the pattern of positive and negative space to be to my liking. In an area like this, the long back-and-forth strokes help to establish an area of transition from hair to skin without doing any blending. You can enhance the transition effect even more with the following technique. What I'm going to do is select their hair outline then hold down the option key and drag to make an offset copy of it. This does two things. First, it makes the outline more detailed, but if I use the transparency palette to set the blend mode to multiply and the opacity to something less than 100 %, then I get a gray or version of the outline that helps to soften the edges. I could even do it more than once to make it even more subtle and detailed. If I want more variety, I can use the direct selection tool to alter some of the shapes, so it doesn't look quite so mechanical. You can see here on the eyebrows. How well this technique works? I spent a fair amount of time with the original outline then duplicated it twice and set the blend mode of all three to multiply with an opacity of 75 %. This same technique works well for moustaches and beards. In this case. There'S a very deep back and forth sharp edged outline with four shapes set to 70 % opacity and again, a blend mode of multiply where the shapes don't overlap. I get a lighter area along the edges with the insides getting darker, as the shapes overlap more yes, this does take a fair amount of time to do. It isn't a quick and easy technique, but like most things in life, if it's worth doing it's worth taking the time to do it well, once I'm happy with the outline of the hair, it's time to consider the highlights, this is where I want to use my Lightest reference photo, so I can see the details hidden in the darkness. The problem is that if I hit command Y to go into the outline view, then I can't see the photo if I'm in the preview mode. I still can't see the photo because it's under the solid shape of the hair, the solution is to hold down the command key while clicking on the specific layer. I want to be an outline view. This allows me to see an outline view of what I'm drawing while still seeing the reference photo. Now that I have the drawing layer set up properly, I can zoom in to a particular area to work on it. What I want to do is represent what the highlight is doing not drawing every single hair but rendering just enough detail to suggest the form believably. This is what it looks like when it's finished. It'S a back and forth motion with sharp pointed edges. When I'm doing here, I usually limit myself to three values with this here, I'm using black as the base color and a dark gray, and then a slightly lighter gray for the highlights. I use the lightest reference photo first to draw the biggest highlight shapes. Then I switch to the darkest exposure reference photo where you can see. The highlights are not nearly as large. These will become the brightest parts of the highlights when I'm finished it may not. Look great from close up, but from far back the highlights serve to define the volume of the hair. Well, I spent a fair amount of time examining the reference to decide the level of detail. I want this isn't something where I can reveal my secret easy technique for getting this done. It involves a lot of good judgment that comes with experience in careful observation, and here you can see the completed illustration, with the hair being at a level of finish. That is consistent with the rest of the illustration now that I'm finished with a standard image based representation of the hair. Let me show you a few variations of hairstyles. You might encounter with ethnic models I'll start by making. My son bald then draw in what used to be called back in my high school days of fro. I'M not hip enough to know what it's called now: here's how I did it in order to focus more on the hair itself. I'Ve isolated it in its own document, without the face I've drawn the basic outline using smooth lines and filled it with the darkest gray. The next step is to roughen up the smooth edges. It will take too much time to do with the pin tool so I'll use a filter. Instead, I'm zooming in so you can see the effect of the filter with the shape selected, I'm going to effect, distort transform and finally roughen clicking. The preview allows me to see what the default settings look like: 5 percent on the size and ten ridges per inch is too much. So the first thing I want to do is lower these values. For the size, a fraction of a percent will do the job nicely. The ridges are too sharp and pointed so I'm going to click here to have the ridges be smooth points rather than corner points. I'D like to have even more detail in here. So I'm changing this value from 10 to 20, with more ridges, I think I'll take the size down even further. This is something I think I can work with. So I'm going to accept these values. You can see that the result is some very nice edge detail. Now I copy the shape command C and paste in front command F, with the shape selected, I go to window swatch, libraries patterns, basic graphics and then textures after some experimenting. I think this one right here is the best option to get what I'm after. Let me zoom in on it, so you can see what it looks like this is giving the impression of the very tight curls that I'm looking for. I do, however, want a bit more variety, so I'm going to duplicate this pattern filled shape again and duplicate it right. On top of the original, by doing the standard copy paste in front action, with the top shape selected, I use the rotation tool to rotate the pattern, but not the outside shape. I do this by clicking transform pattern and unclicking transform objects. I think a rotation of about 45 degrees will work with a click on the preview button. We can see how the pattern becomes more complex. If I want some more variety, I can use the transparency palette to set the blend mode to multiply and the opacity to about 40 % or so zooming out shows a nice textural effect, but I think I'd like the edge to be a little softer. If I select both the texture layers and hit command 3, I can hide them which allows me to select the solid gray background shape a trip to effect blur Gaussian. Blur gets me to this panel, a value of about 20 softens the edges nicely before unhiding the textures. I want to address the flatness of the hair. Ideally, it will have some highlights and shadows to help define its three-dimensional form, I'm going to put a shape to shape blend, highlight here and another shape to shape blend here for the shadow. It'S worth pointing out that if I change my mind later on and want to make changes to the rough outline or the Gaussian blur, I won't be able to do it in the same place. I first assigned the values: instead, while the shape is selected, I'm going to go to window appearance and get to the appearance palette. This shows all the attributes of the shape. If I decide the blur is too soft, I can click right here to get back to the blur palette, where I can knock it down some and make it a harder edge notice. Also that when I go into the wireframe view, the rough and filter doesn't show, this means that I can use the appearance panel to change it. Of course, in order to see my changes, I need to be in the preview mode. What you see here is that I've created a shape to shape blend, where this shape is the same color as the base hair color, and this shape is a little bit lighter. This blend is similar. The bigger shape is the same color as the hair color, but the smaller shape is darker. I select both shapes and blend them together. I'Ve covered this in other videos, so I won't take the time to explain it step-by-step here when I'm finished. It looks like this now I unhide the two texture shapes to see the final result. Of course you can make the blends lighter or darker to make a more subtle or pronounced highlight. You can also apply a Gaussian blur to the texture shapes to soften the curls. I like the look of this, but be careful because the Gaussian blur is a very RAM intensive filter it'll make your file sizes much larger and screen drawers will slow down by quite a bit. If you don't have a lot of RAM, you may end up watching the spinning wheel of slowness for a while, and there you have a technique for drawing one type of african-american hair, a third style of hair. We can try as dreadlocks I'm doing them pretty short, but this technique can work for any link you want. This is also a ram intensive process, so be prepared to be patient with screen redraws. The key to doing the dreads in an efficient manner is to design a dread brush that I can use to quickly create a number of strands. Something that looks like this when it's finished there's any number of ways to create this. But let me show you the way I did it. The first step is to create a black stroke with the thickness of 16 points. Then I use the stroke palette to round off the end cap. Next, I go to effect distort roughen. I did this before with the edge of the fro and the concept is the same. I need to adjust the defaults to get what I want: 2 % for the size 12 for the amount and smooth for the points feels about right. Now I expand the appearance to make the distortions permanent and then object path outline stroke to make this a shape rather than a path with a thickness see the difference here. In the outline view, this particular dread brush will be a dark gray, with a lighter gray, highlight the blob brush tis a good job. For me with drawing the highlight, I can use the left or right arrow keys to make this brush bigger or smaller. This doesn't need to be super detailed. I can add some variety by changing the size of the brush periodically color wise. I want two different versions of this. I make a copy by holding down the option key and dragging the color of the copy changes to black with the darker highlight each one of these will be the basis for a new brush. New brushes are created from the brushes palette. I just select one of the dreads and drag it into the brushes palette. A dialog box appears asking me what kind of brush I want. I choose art brush and click. Ok, which gets me to another dialog box. Here I can name the brush and make a decision about whether I want the brush shape to scale proportionally or to stretch along the length of the path that I assign it to I'll scale. This one proportionally to show you what it looks like. I create a line with the pen tool, then apply the brush applying the brush to shorter lines results in a proportionally smaller dread. The other option is to have the brush stretch to fit the length of the path, but have the thickness stay. The same. The brush distorts to fit whether it is extended or condensed. The second option is the one I'll be going with. I have the darker dreads on a layer below the face, and I'm going to put the lighter dreads on a layer above the face. I want to keep the lines flowing in the right direction. Obviously, in this case I don't have a reference photo to work from, but I do have a sense for where the locks should go, so it looks like they're oriented on the head properly. I want enough to make it look thick, but I don't necessarily have to cover every bit of the scalp. With the lines drawn, I hit command a to select them all then assign the lighter dread brush to the strokes. This is more efficient than doing them. One at a time this is what it looks like when I'm finished. Underneath the head layer, I've drawn the darker dreads above the head layer. I have the lighter dreads notice. There are some gaps here, I'll take care of that next. Once again, this will take a fair amount of RAM, I'm going to make a duplicate of the medium dread layer. Before I move on, you see these yellow lines here that indicate they can be expanded and they do need to be expanded once I've expanded them. It looks pretty crazy, as you can see, when I go to the outline view, they're just a ton of points here, I'm really only interested in the edges. Not all this mess in the middle. I select all the shapes then go to Pathfinder and choose unite. This looks better, but I still need to clean out these inside shapes, I'm going to use my direct selection tool to select and delete them once all the interior shapes are gone. It looks like this fill it up with solid black and then I'll play around with the stacking order to get all the layers to work together. Here'S the dark treads on the bottom and the lighter dreads. On top this way, I don't see the scalp through the openings in the dreads, the dreads look too light, but I'm doing this on purpose. So I can add some blending to darken up the shadow on the side of the head in order to establish that I'm going to use this shape again, I duplicate the layer, then change the stacking order, so that this copy is, on top of all the other Hair layers now I fill this layer with a radial gradient. You can do this shading. However, you want I'm doing it this way for the demonstration to show you how the concept works, because it's relatively easy to do. I don't want this to be solid black, so I'll lighten it up a bit changing the blend mode to multiply allows the dreads underneath to show through I turn on the face layer to see how the whole package comes together, and I, like the results, the one Thing that still bothers me is that, if the light is coming from this direction, I should be seeing some cast shadows on the forehead I'm using this shape. Once again, I duplicate the layer, then turn off all the other layers, except the face layer which is locked. I'M going to make the shadow by moving this shape down into the left and give it a Gaussian blur, but I don't want to see any shadow outside the face. I draw a shape with a pen tool, then select both the new shape and the hair then use the intersect function of the Pathfinder palette to keep only the area where they overlap. Now I fill it up with black, give it a soft edge with the Gaussian blur then use the transparency palette to lower the opacity and set the blend mode. To multiply to make the shadow color interact more naturally with the flesh tones I'm going to have to tweak this somewhat, because obviously I want shading only on the skin, but I think you can see how this can work for you, and here it is all finished. I didn't spend a whole lot of time trying to get the dreads to flow properly, but it should give you a good understanding of how to accomplish this technique. If you spend some time on it and use good reference material, I'm sure you can do a better job than I did. We can call this next style, Edward Scissorhands or maybe Doc Brown, because it's going to be really wild and crazy. As before, I'm going to have some of the hair be under the head layer and some on top of the head layer, rather than watching me draw those lines. I'Ve already created some on this layer. If I want to fill it in a little more, I can select them all and copy and paste to get a second set. I use the scale tool to make them slightly smaller, then the rotate tool to offset them from the originals a little more pretty quickly and easily I've doubled the number of hair lines. I followed the same procedure with the hair on top of the face layer, copy/paste, rotate and scale. Creating a new brush is also a key to this hairstyle. I want a long shape with a wide base on the left and a sharp point on the right as before, I'm going to drag it into the brushes palette and make it into an art brush. I select all the strokes from both layers and apply the new brush. I do have to make sure all of the strokes were drawn in the same direction. If I don't, I may get some brush strokes that are wide on the outside. Instead of being pointed now that I have it roughly correct, I expand the appearance of the brush strokes to clear out most of the unnecessary points in here. I use the unite button on the Pathfinder palette. I then use the direct selection tool to select and delete any stray shapes. Here'S the result: a black layer underneath and a slightly lighter gray layer on top if a spiky, hair anime look is what I'm after I can stop here, but I would like to make it even more crazy to do that. I'M using the troll tool, which is found under the width tool in the tool palette. This circle shows the area of influence of the tool. I'D like it to be bigger, so I double click on the tool to access its attributes, I'll change the size on both directions to 6 inches and leave the pressure at 50 %. I move it over the area. I want to distort and hold down the mouse. The longer I hold it, the greater the twirl I can make it even Wilder by duplicating the top layer, then enlarge and rotate it for some variety of value. I then use the transparency palette to change the opacity to 75 % and set the blend mode. To multiply this technique really lends itself to experimentation, having fun, try it for yourself and see what you can do with it. The last thing I want to show you is a way to represent beard stubble. Let'S say he has a soul patch goatee thing going on, but he also hasn't shaved in several days, so he has a 5 o'clock shadow in here. The first thing I do is draw a shape to define the limits of the stubble like this. Then I go to window swatch library patterns, basic graphics, textures. You can experiment with different textures, but I find that I like this one right here, this sort of works, but I think I can improve on it with the shape selected. I go to the scale tool to double click and to get access to the dialog box. I want to scale the pattern in a non-uniform way, so I can elongate these circles into ovals. I don't want to transform the object. I only want to transform the pattern, so I deselect that and put in 100 % for the horizontal and vertical at 25 %. I, like the new dot shapes, but I'm not liking these lines in the pattern. I'D like the ovals to lay at an angle more like beard hairs. So in the same way I can scale the pattern, but not the shape. I can also rotate the pattern, but not the shape. I unclick rotate object but keep rotate pattern. Then click OK to rotate it 25 % to break up these lines, I'm going to copy the shape and paste it in front command. F. I can still see the lines, but when I rotate the copy a little more, it breaks up the straight lines and I'd like to look much better. What I don't like is the hard edge of the stubble. This to me doesn't look good at all. Let me bring this off to the side, so you can see what I'm doing a little bit better. I'M going to make a copy of this shape by option dragging then change the fill color to black. Now I make another copy command C command F to paste. In front the fill color on this one is white with the direct selection tool. I move points in to make the top white shape smaller in order to make a shape to shape blend that will serve as an opacity mask to make the stubble pattern gradually fade. In along the edges, with both shape selected, I go to object blend, make the gradation blends from white to black in Photoshop. When you do a layer mask the image shows where the mask is white. It doesn't show where it's black, with gray values, showing varying amounts of transparency, works the same an illustrator, I'm going to take my blend and put it right on top of the two fields: texture shapes now, I'm going to select all of them and go to the Transparency palette and click make masks. So what I see happening here is that I can see the stubble full strength here, but then it gradually starts to fade out now when I bring it back over and put it on top of the face see. This looks more natural. If I want it darker, I can use the transparency palette to change the blend mode. To multiply this technique can also work with balding or close shaved heads as well, so there he is my ruggedly handsome son thanks. So much for watching feel free to contact me with questions or comments. If you haven't already done so check out my other videos for tips on how to do portraits and long female hair in Adobe Illustrator