How To Draw African American Braids

One of my readers, Dee, brought it to my attending that there are no practiced online tutorials on drawing African American hair. Hopefully, this post will help reply some questions!

The biggest deviation between African American hair and hair of other ethnicities is the texture. It is often more coarse and can range from tight, corkscrew curls to a softer, about fuzzy texture. It can also be straightened, in which case you would draw information technology similar any other hair.

African American hair is also very night. I would use a combination of 2B and 4B pencils, peradventure even a 6B. Because of the coarser texture and darker colour, this type of hair doesn't reflect light as much. This ways that your highlights will be but slightly lighter than the rest of the hair. Let'south look at an example:

Here nosotros take an example of a very curly style of African American hair. Take a wait at the values. Find how the darkest value is nearly black, and the lightest value is still a very nighttime gray. When working with nighttime pilus like this, yous are working at the darker stop of the value scale, even when drawing the highlights.

These are the values I pulled out of the above picture show. The left-almost gray is the highlight, the lightest role of the hair. The middle gray is the midtones and the black is the shadows. As you tin can see, in that location is no bright white highlight in this hair!

Tutorial

Using the above epitome as a reference, I'yard going to show you how I would become virtually drawing curly, African American pilus.

Here, I take used a 2H pencil to draw the outlines of the basic shapes I'm working with. For the purpose of this tutorial, I'one thousand going to ignore the faces and focus on only hair.

Next, I use my 2B and create a layer of very tight, spirals. I'm fugitive the edges of the pilus and where it falls on the forehead because I volition add that in at the end. This creates a base of operations layer that reflects the texture of the pilus. So I used a large tortillon in a screw motion to blend out my pencil lines.

Take your 4B pencil and start to lay in the shadows. Utilize the spiral motion once more, and pay close attending to the reference. This is where we tin can get-go to highlight some of the individual curls in the pilus by defining the dark shadows effectually them. Remember that y'all don't have to draw every petty detail, just expect for the patterns of light and dark created past the hair. Create darker shadows by layering more graphite, so blend it out using the big tortillon.

Next, I used my 6B pencil to create fifty-fifty darker shadows, over again avoiding the lighter areas that are the curls. And then I used the tortillon to alloy out the unabridged area of hair. This tones down the highlights a piffling, but that'south okay.

At present for the finishing touches. Create a fine point with your kneaded eraser and pick out a few highlights along each curl of hair. Use curt, curved lines to mimic the direction of the pilus. And then, using your 3B, add some details around the edges of the hair and onto the forehead. These fly-aways are what make the hair wait realistic. I used more of a zig-zag line than a screw pattern to re-create the look of the ends of each curl. You tin can also utilise the tortillon to soften these lines slightly.

Do you have a burning question or a bully idea for a tutorial? Let me know!

Source: https://learntoart.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/how-to-draw-african-american-hair-tutorial/

Posted by: reichertwelds1979.blogspot.com

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