Header image; art by REFF Annie Rodrigue
      "White Out or White Gouache are your friends!!!!!" — Maïna  

    STEP 4: Anime-Spikey Hair

  Drawing spikey hair without knowing how to draw more realistic hair can lead to some nonsense mistakes. So, for that reason, I'm going through spikey hair after straight and curly hair even though most of spikey hair mistakes I've seen are pretty much beginner mistakes. ^^


    Common Mistake #1: Deformed Head

This shouldn't look unfamiliar - I've actually covered this topic in Step One. Well, review time! ^o^ Look carefully at the image to the left. For some people, it may be hard to see any mistakes, but if you look at the image to the right, you'll see that the head is shaped really oddly: it's too small, as if it's been pressed around (ouch).



To the left is what the head should look like. As you can see, the hair doesn't cover some parts of the head, which doesn't make any sense. You should always draw the head *before* getting started on the hair - it really helps you avoid this kind of mistake. The image to the right shows what the whole thing should look like, with the hair completely covering the head.



    CM #2: Flat Character

  CM#2 is essencially a coloring/shading mistake, so it will be covered again in coloring process. But it bothers me so much that I just can't leave it out here. ^^; I've seen some advanced artists color hair this way (in which case, they're probably intentional), but that still doesn't stop me from getting annoyed.

  So look: what's wrong with the hair highlight in the image to the right? The highlight sort of just wraps around the hair as one single continuous line without any breaks. This "continuous line highlight" method works for certain hair styles (especially the perfectly straight hair, which can be seen in Escaflowne - Hitomi's hair), but NOT for spikey hair! Spikey hair spikes out like the needles of a hedgehog, which means every single "spike" stands in all different directions. Different directions mean that different spikes receive the light and cast the shadow in different parts. So if you ignore that and just apply the continuous line highlight on spikey hair, it'll result in a very flat looking character, instead of a nice 3D looking one.


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