Michael Emerald said:

I have been drawing hair. I notice the shading, but I also notice a

LOT of texture. How do you think of hair as you draw it? Do you think

of it as surrounding that egg-shape? Do you look at the profile of the

hair, the body of the hair, or both? Thanks.

And Graham McCarthur responded:

Hair is not easy. It's not all black and white.

If everything black was really black and everything white was pure

white we would see nothing except flat, featureless shapes with sharp

outlines. I was tought by my old drawing teacher in art school that

there is no such thng as a line, only areas of tone. Nothing in life

is so simple as a line - in reality reflections and absorbance of

light are what we see. It's the highlights and shadows of a object

that tell us what shape the object is - the underlying structure is

never overtly seen.

I cannot stress this too much — lines made by pencils, pens, do not

draw hairs. Pencil marks only define the position and shape of hairs.

That may be a little too simplistic. There will be occasions when dark

hair overlays a patch of white hair and requires a positive pencil

stroke. But in general a line does not represent a hair — it forms the

boundary between hairs.

Think Negative and Positive.

Drawing hair is about positive and negative drawing - representing

tone not line, and each has to be understood in its own right before

you can combine the two and reproduce hair with a sense of reality.

We see black hair because of its highlights; white hairs are outlined

by their shadows. In both cases the hairs are visible because of their

"negative" properties. For black hair the highlight will range from

bright, white through a series of darkening greys but not, however, to

black - the darkest tones available must be reserved for the positive

shadows that define the edges of black hairs not for the hairs

themselves.

This is the key to negative drawing. Attention must be paid not on the

actual lines you are drawing but on the spaces in between them.

Similar in some ways to watercolour painting, the only white available

for use is the white of the paper. To produce a white line you must

therefore define that line by outlining it in a darker tone. The line

you are drawing has no importance in itself. It is the space between

the lines that is important. Remember that it not what it is, but what

it does that is important.

Working one small area at a time will make life drawing hair easier,

both mentally and physically and will keep you firmly in control.

Don't be tempted to work on the whole drawing at once and avoid

filling whole areas with tone. Beware - the bright highlights you

may later need will no longer be achievable if you have already

created an area of tone, resulting in a distinct loss of life and

tonal depth.

Decide on the light direction first, consider the position of every

hair you need to define and then apply tone to create highlights

accordingly. Defining your hairs and then calculating and adding

specific local tone will give them an enhanced reality — don't use a

general toning technique, often refered to as 'global toning' and hope

it will work locally. Drawing hair is slow building up of specific

areas.

A link to a graphite drawing of mine using the method described above is here:

http://gmca.blogspot.com/2006/06/james-clifford-final-drawing.html#links

Hope this helps a little.

Take care, have fun,

Graham