Colouring Hair

Good afternoon!

I'm back today to share the latest addition to my tutorials page - hair colouring. And I mean colouring the hair of an image with Copics, not colouring my own hair!!! 

So here it is - 

Two - Hair

So today (21/06/13) I'm going to continue my colouring of the Saturated Canary image 'Boobie'. You'll see below I have already coloured the skin so now I'll share how I colour the hair. I've taken photos of colouring one side to show the technique which is similar to the skin to be fair as I use the same rules no matter what I'm colouring.

So these are the colours I'm going to use.  I usually work with 5 colours for the hair but it can be 5 of whatever colour you choose as long as you get a good range from light to dark to get that real depth of shade.

I start with the very lightest to map out my shadows.

Going over it with the next shade.

Then the next but now I start to make individual strands by flicking the nib.

It's hard to describe how or why I do each stage it's just what comes to me. It's all about building layers.

Up to this point I'm just laying down colour and planning where my light source will hit but now I'm going to start creating the hair strands as I work back to the lightest colour.

As you can see I'm flicking more into the lighter areas now.

Working back down the colour shades flicking to create the strands.

This shade brings out the real shine and warmth but I'm careful not to cover the white completely.

I use the very lightest to go over the rest apart from the very darkest areas, this as you can see tones down the colours, blending the layers. I now leave this to dry completely. At this stage I'm happy with my planning of where the light and dark areas are and will continue flicking to create strands once this is dry.

Once dry I add more gold to the lighter areas.

Then I skip shades to the 2nd darkest to add clearly defined strands.

Then I add a few more darker strands.  You'll notice I don't use all of the colours at this point I want it to look like hair with singles strands. If I used all the colours again I would lose the definition.

I repeat all of the above stages on the opposite side to complete the hair. You'll now see that the skin doesn't look as harsh and looks paler than it did before!

I never colour hair in one go, I always break it up into sections. This allows me to work and blend properly. If I tried to colour the hair in one go some areas would have dried by the time I got back to them so the initial blending and layers wouldn't be as effective. Even on short hair I work in sections. 

As you can see my techniques for colouring doesn't change too much no matter what I colour. Obviously hair needs to be a bit more defined rather than being fully blended like the skin did.

So I hope that makes sense and helps a little to understand how I colour!

Take care Zo xx