Part 3: Hairy Business
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I know this tutorial was meant to cover the making of Mat from start to finish. But, well, I did Mat a while ago now. And it's very hard to show how hair is done when all you have is the completed item. So, for this part of the tutorial, I've used a new image - a portrait of Faile.

Sometimes I do hair first, sometimes I do it last, other times in between. Depends on how I'm feeling at the time. For Faile, it was one of the last things I did. To begin with, I lightly sketched out some fine hairs to get a general idea of how it would sit around the face. IMPORTANT NOTE: It's almost impossible to do realistic hair with only a mouse. It can be done, but it's much slower. If you're a mouse user, go buy a drawing tablet. If you can't afford one, have lots of patience ^_^; Basically, it's very hard to draw smooth curves with a mouse in the direction you want them to do.

TIP FOR MOUSE USERS: In my old mouse days, I would hold down the shift key while clicking points with the brush tool in a curve shape. Holding down shift draws a straight line from the first click to the next click. If you keep doing that, you can get a fairly good line. But it does take a long time.

Anyway, back to Faile. I drew in the fine lines. Then, I coloured in a dark block area on a new layer where the bulk of the hair would be - no skin or background would be showing through these parts.

At this stage, I'm still not interested in colours. I'm just using a nice dark colour to do all the work, and get all the basic hair shape down.

Next, still on the bulk hair layer, I go over the original hair strands I drew, making them much darker and adding in many more strands to get a good quantity of hair. There is no cheating in my pics - every single strand is drawn individually.

TIP FOR MOUSE USERS: You can cheat if you like! Check out the second image below. Grab a nice spotty brush in Photoshop like the one in the picture. Then, set brush fade to about 200 pixels (in brushes --> shape dynamics in PS7, right side of main toolbar in PS6). Click and drag - you'll get a big bunch of hairs that come to a point like in the picture. Worked for me for a long time ^_^

Right, now it's time to add some shine to that dull, lifeless hair - without expensive shampoo. I use at least three or four different colours to add in highlights. Hair looks more realistic if it has a bit of variation. The first colour I layed down was a dull brown, which I added all throughout the hair to start distinguishing individual hairs. Then, a lightish grey-brown for a bit of highlighting, then finally a light grey-peach for the brighest highlights. In this stage, I also broke up the outline of the hair bulk by adding lots of random messy strands around the edges. Make sure to throw in a few hairs that don't follow the general direction of the rest - otherwise the hair will risk getting a plastic, hair-sprayed, artifical look. See the close up below.