Chapter 16: Painting Hair

Hair is not as hard to paint as it may seem. This chapter will show you how to paint one type of hair. Because it is difficult to paint just hair without painting a face, this chapter will also review the basics of painting a face. The secret to success for painting hair is to not get caught up in all of the small details, namely the individual strands of hair. Hair is usually simple variations of the skin's colors. Stay away from using too much yellow when painting blond hair. Instead, use lots of yellowish grays with muted browns and with touches of yellow in the highlights. Red hair has lots of oranges and purples in the light areas. The highlights on black hair often appear bluish. The same is true for dark brown hair but not to the same degree. In this chapter, darker brown hair will be painted being lit from both the side and with a strong backlight.

What You Need to Know About Photoshop for This Chapter

For this chapter, the special things you need to know about Photoshop are

• Where individual palettes are located

• How to create and manipulate individual layers

• How to adjust a brush's opacity

• How to resize your brush and sample color from within the image (preferably using hot keys)