Sketching Hair Texture in Monotone

Posted by Jo Murphy Aug 22, 2007

When she writes articles Rebekah Lynn shows both the right and wrong way to capture the effects she talks of.Creating Tangible, Touchable Hair is a very comprehensive tutorial about drawing hair.

I recommend you follow some of her exercises with your students.

As always, keep it simple, it is better to tease out each elements of design the students need to grasp, as you talk about each drawing exercise you give your students.

Your students will have been taught about texture from the article What Is Texture? and they will know that Texture is ”When you make something look like it would feel if you touched it."

• As you encourage the students to draw hair ask them to stay with monotone to start with.
• Ask them to practice directional lines and shading in an attempt to get to better know the texture of hair.

The students will enjoy Rebakah’s reference to helmet and haystack hair. In her humorous way she is showing the students how to be discerning about the harshness of their lines and the cropping of shape.

When the students bring in the funniest bad hair day photo they can find, it can be from a magazine or they could even go out searching for research material in the wind, or at the pool or even at the hairdressers.

Again I caution you to teach them about boundaries and make sure they don’t burst into the local hairdresser and click away at the poor unsuspecting clients. As always teach them to ask first, telling the respondents what the photos will be used for.

As a prize for the best drawn sketch – perhaps you could laminate and display extra especially well drawn ‘hair do’s or especially funny ‘hair do’s. Make as many certificates as you need to really give incentive for this to be great project.

When the students have had enough fun and they feel comfortable with drawing hair you could develop the exercise by asking them to do coloured sketches of animals or birds such as Chinese Chickens. Shaggy, cropped, soft and silky or rough and bristly – colours, tones and textures - the possibilities for interesting drawing projects are endless.

If you want to explore drawing further you might like How To Draw The Easy Way or to take this course

Drawing 101 - a free Suite101 course