How To Paint Hair
Eric-anthony Johnson gets back to basics with a beginner-friendly guide to painting hair that looks like the real thing
Along with hands, hair is one of the those parts of the human body that can make otherwise rational artists tremble with fear. It’s a challenging feature to paint so that it looks convincing, but it’s pretty much impossible to avoid – unless your thing is Professor X fan art.
Eric-anthony Johnson’s video offers a foolproof way of rendering hair that looks the part, even if you’ve little art experience to date. He presents every step in real time, narrating as he paints and covering every detail, from brush selection (you won’t need many) to finishing touches such as blending the hair into the skin for a more natural feel. The basic technique is to start with dark colours and work your way through to thinly painted highlights, but it’s the details Eric-anthony reveals that will make all the difference to the results you can achieve.
If you’re a beginner, you’ll also learn some basic digital software craft that you’ll find incredibly useful. You’ll see how to use layers to build up detail in a way that enables you to undo mistakes more easily, and how clipping masks can give you control over where you can and can’t paint.
Eric-anthony shows his techniques using Clip Studio Paint (the painting package formerly known as Manga Studio), but you’ll find the same tools in Photoshop, Procreate or virtually any other art software. You also get a few Clip Studio Paint brushes to add to your repertoire.
There’s little in this video that experienced artists won’t have read or watched somewhere else, or figured out for themselves. Yet if you’re still quite new to digital art, Eric-anthony’s clear explanations and straightforward approach will get you on the fast track towards painting realistic hair.