How To Draw Hair On Inkscape

Howdy, welcome to my beginning tutorial. Here you'll acquire how create basic natural hairstyles using Inkscape. It'south very easy; no drawing skill any required!

This is Manyara. She'll be our model for today's tutorial.

Tight curls are probably the easiest hair texture to create. For this image I besides used the technique from Chrisdesign Web log's tutorial on straight/relaxed hair to draw the front end hair where it is pulled back.

Here are the steps in Inkscape:

Draw a circle using the ellipse tool. (The ellipse tool is the pink circle on primary toolbar on the left side of the screen.)
From the main menu at the top of the screen, select Object > Fill up and Stroke. The Fill up and Stroke tab will appear on the right side of the screen. Conform the the colour to something several shades darker than the actual hair color you are going for. Also add a minor blur; I used about 12.5 in the image above. At this indicate your image should look something like this:

The underlying shape of the fro.
Manyara with "tight" textured fro.

Okay! You're well on your way to making a beautiful Afro. At present we just need to add some hairs. Use the screw tool to create a small screw. In this instance I used a spiral with 1 plow, 0.v divergence, and 0 inner radius. You can tighten or loosen the spiral to create slightly different pilus textures.
Next information technology's fourth dimension to set up the hair color. In the Fill up and Stroke tab, make sure your spiral has no fill (the X is selected under the fill tab.) Nether Stroke pigment, choose linear slope, and so select edit. The Gradient editor will open up. Past default there are 2 stops, and we need three, so add together 1 more cease. Set the i of the end stops to a color slightly lighter than than the color of the circle from Step 2. I recommend using the HSL tab and so you can suit lightness independently of hue. For the heart finish, increase the lightness quite a scrap more. In my case the centre is nearly 28 points lighter than the ends. I also cut the saturation in half. Y'all may accept to come dorsum and accommodate this later on one time you lot see how the terminal product looks. See below for some great tricks to brand this kind of editing quick and easy.
Zooming in on your curl, it should look more or less like this:

A single strand, greatly magnified.

Alright, here'south is the fun role! Select your curl (information technology should be bodily size, not huge like the example above. If information technology is besides big, just ctrl-click on the handles to adjust the size.) With the nap selected, click on the spray tin tool on the principal toolbar. Set the Way to "Clone" (the center option of the three at the top left corner of the window.) Set "Amount" and "Rotation" to 100. Calibration: 6, Scatter: ten, Focus: 0. Now spray the whole area until the entire circle is covered. The result should look something similar this:

A ball of pilus.

One time you've done that, all that'south left is to clean up any stray hairs that are besides far outside the circle, adjust the colors, and make any necessary adjustments to the size/shape/blur of the circle. It's done! Just copy and paste onto a layer below your character'due south caput. For styles that don't pull the hair back, repeat the same process for the pilus in front of the head, adjusting the shape to lucifer where y'all want the hairline to be.

Manyara with a slightly looser afro texture.

A few tips:

If yous spray with clones, press Shift-D to select the original. Changes to the original affect all the copies, and so endeavor changing the size to instantly adjust the hair texture. Be careful non to delete the original or all the hair will disappear.
For most styles you'll need to employ this technique on at least 2 layers, one for hair in forepart of the head, and one for the dorsum.
Inkscape tin can sometimes run a little slow. You can speed things up by hiding other layers or working on the pilus in a divide file.

I hope you lot've enjoyed this first tutorial. Leave a annotate to allow me know if y'all have establish it helpful, or if you have whatever questions, thoughts, or suggestions!