Adding Wavy Hair and a Unique Hand Pose To a Sketch

Every person in the world has a hairstyle. Their hairstyle may be extremely long, down to their lower back, or no hair at all. To draw hair is an extremely fun, yet difficult process. Drawing hair can be difficult because there is no "right" way to draw it. However in the book, Drawing Manga, Faces, and Bodies, by Anna Southgate and Yishan Li, they address several hairstyles. In the book they commented on long hair, short hair, and unique styles. The style I chose to focus on for my drawing is wavy hair. For wavy hair I had to imagine there was a slight breeze blowing the hair to one side. To start the hair make a simple wavy line. This line should be vaguely S-shaped, and usually vertical. Afterwards, draw another wavy line semi-close to the first. If desired, feint lines can be added for detail or connecting the hair. (Southgate and Li, Pg.35) As you can tell in the picture, many strands of the hair are extremely exaggerated S's. Some of the strands of hair are very vertical, like Southgate and Li suggested, while others are stretched. I decided to add some stretched S like hair to add more realism to the hair. I also followed their advice of connecting the two separate S line with a feint line. This, in my opinion, really completed the drawing. Without the connecting line the picture appeared very 2-D and not appealing. This technique in particular, connecting the hair, will impact my drawing style for sure. It added a necessary depth that the drawing was missing before. I will continue to use and take advantage of that technique in my drawings to come.

Another concept that I focused on for this drawing was the placement and poses of the hands. As you can tell from the picture above, one hand is more detailed, while the other is barely visible. I centered my attention to the hand by the girls face. To draw this hand, I followed the authors advice on a particular pose. On page 58 it says, "This hand is almost horizontal, with the fingers poised." (Southgate and Li, Pg. 58) Although this advice is very short, it helped me start and finish the hand. I was very confused as to how I wanted this hand to turn out. I drew and erased probably 8-9 times before I even got something I was remotely happy with. The horizontal placement was hard to use as it made the hand look disproportioned. Then I tried to make the fingers looked more poised. This really helped pull the hand together. With the fingers more distinct and longer, the hand looked slightly less disproportioned then it had before. This made me realize how important it is to draw the fingers with precision. With the fingers drawn well, the hand will more naturally follow. I will try harder to draw fingers more detailed and poised.


Do you have a specific way to draw hands?
Southgate, Anna, and Yishan Li. Drawing Manga Faces and Bodies. New York: Rosen, 2013. Print.