Weekly Art Practice - Week 5
This is another week where I wanted to push the boundaries of the format. A large part of drawing practice is to get more ideas into your head, basically to build a shape library. So my goal with this week’s focus was twofold: broaden my mental library of hair styles and also find ways to convey hairstyles as minimally as possible.
After 5 days of it, I’m not sure how I feel.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
Day 1 as usual was pretty messy. Put down some vague head shapes and attempted to think of hair styles I know. This day is always a little difficult because you come up against the blank page of your mind. The classic moment of “have I even seen hair before?” when you try to mentally form an image in your head.
Day 2 - Figure sketching
Day 2 went a little better, the gift of being able to look at references. But this leads to falling into the hair trap: Drawing too many lines.
I’ve done hair tutorials before, I know that for drawing detailed hair you want to break it down into sections and try to just draw those sections, add minimal individual strands at the end to add a few fly aways or play with the shape. I find this very hard to do when working from a photo reference as hair is so messy. And the more time I spend on them the more lines I keep adding.
Day 3 - Reference studies
This day is supposed to be spending more time with the photo references but that just means adding more strands and making more of a mess :’) I’m not sure why this week feels like it’s going so bad but I’m starting to feel like hair styles may have been too big of a topic. I possibly could have tried a sub theme, like up-dos or long or lose hair. By just trying to do a large variety of hair styles I didn’t feel like I could focus on learning a few tricks to pull off something specific.
Day 4 - Style studies
When choosing styles to study I very much focused on simplified cartoon styles. Stayed away from over the top anime styles and didn’t want anything super realistic. But I worry this has led to almost too much simplification and I’d like to find a style somewhere in the middle.
I tried using only forward facing faces for this day to make myself think of the hair style from a slightly different but consistent angle.
Reference: The original link to this one on Instagram seems to be dead but found a reference to it here.
Reference: ABD Illustrates
I think this is the middle ground cartoon style I like most. But when looking at these a lot of the bangs and overall styles were a little too un-realistic to me. The artist does say they were exploring futuristic hairstyles so I don't think they are supposed to be the most realistic styles out there.
Reference: []@Cheriiart on Twitter](https://twitter.com/cheriiart/status/1187823921938092032)
This is probably the most simplified style out of all of them. Mostly just the exterior lines to show the shape of the hair.
Reference: This is my first full failure to find a reference source. This image has been pinned on Pinterest so many times I can't find a non-Pinterest source. One source was a video so it might be from a TikTok????
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
While I often feel a little bit of fear on day 5, this is the time I probably feared it the most. Partially because I didn’t feel like I had any big insightful moments during my reference or style study days. And additionally because I didn’t come up with a way to make the “final project” more engaging than drawing shapes on mannequin heads. So I did a few sheets.
These left me feeling rather underwhelmed so I stopped for the day and let myself ruminate on it for a little longer. The next day I sat down and tried to do something a little more directed, which led to you getting to play a Guess That Hair game.
I did look at references for this as the challenge wasn’t just to draw hair but to get it close enough to be able to guess the character just by the hair style. While I don’t feel like this is an overly impressive piece by any means, I am happy that they are all clear to me at a glance. So while I don’t feel confident in my mental library of hair styles I do feel like I’ve found some confidence in translating hair styles into a simplified art style.
Conclusion
I think my lesson for this week is that not all subjects can be covered in a week. While I kind of came to the same conclusion with hands I at least felt like I made progress there while with hair I feel like I just scratched the surface. My biggest takeaway is that I really enjoyed drawing coily hair, it has such a great shape and variety to it.