Sketching Curly Hair

When it comes to sketching curly hair most people dread it. Often people see them as hard to do and hard to get the look they want with them. But according to Charlie Bowater "if you understand how they work, it is a lot easier" (71).  To understand how they work you need to know how to draw them. First I started off with two vertical lines and added a wavy line down the middle. Now depending on how far apart and long you draw the lines will affect the width and length of your curl.  Also when doing this step make sure that the lines you draw are light because those lines are like the guidelines for sketching the curls. Then draw another wavy line a little below the other one.  After that connect the open parts and lastly, remove the guidelines and add detail.  Now when drawing curls variety is key. A tip from Bowater is "look at the hair and how it behaves, simplify, and then draw" (71). Using that tip you are going to have to change the width of your curls, make them slimmer or thicker, split and pull the curl together so the curls look more lively and bouncy as well as you get variety with the curls. As well as you will get a better understanding of how they work and how to add detail to your curls.

Finally when drawing a curly hairstyle, make the curls look natural when drawing the guidelines give it some flow and direction. Then draw the curls.

Bowater suggests that using this technique you can layer the curls one after the other (71). I have tried layering the curls using this technique but it is a little time consuming, though it does give you a better results then what I have tried before.
What techniques help you draw curly hair and do you often dread drawing curly hair? 
Bowater, Charlie. Beginner's Guide to Sketching: Characters, Creatures & Concepts. 3DTotal Publishing, 2015.

Possibilities in Origami

For this month's blog, I decided to do something that had to do with the season. I decided to create an origami snowflake that was shown in the book and expanded my ideas on it by creating different versions, which allowed me to create a variety of snowflakes from just one model. Stated by Kunihiko Kasahara, "The Snowflake reveals a new and multidimensional beauty... a wide field for additional design possibilities" (Kasahara 43).

For this snowflake, it took me many tries and redoes for me to get the paper folds correct. The pictures were easy to read, but the process to reach the pictures were very unclear with only small arrows that overlapped. I decided to go back to the key for the symbols used, which allowed me to see which ones were valley folds and which ones were mountain folds. The directions said to keep into account the marking folds as I made the folds (Kasahara 43). This really helped me as i started to create the folds in the snowflakes because the marking folds allowed me to keep me from being confused of where the folds should be made and the location of the reverse folds.

From this origami snowflake I have learned that you can create many diverse versions of one model and that the arrows shown throughout every picture and marking folds should be taken with a lot of considerations in order to make it look like the correct design. Overall, the origami snowflakes was really fun to make, even with multiple mistakes, I was able to finish and create three different and unique snowflakes.

What's your opinion: Do you like to stick with the original directions or do you experiment to create different version of the original directions and why?




Kasahara, Kunihiko. Extreme Origami. New York: Sterling Pub., 2002. Print.