Tutorials - Hair
We're finished with all the clothes. Now lets give this pixel doll some hair.
Here are the palette I will be using for this tutorial:
The first thing to do is to determine the position of the hairline. On a real person, the it would be at the same distance from the eyebrows as the bottom of the nose is from the eyes, but pixel dolls often have weird proportions, so a best guide would be the edge of the forehead's highlight on the base
Now draw the actual bottom hairline. The easiest way to do this is to see it as a curved triangle going from the part and the ears. Make sure you don't go over the eyebrows.
The top outline of the hair is a bit like a big curved "M" with the middle part going in just a pixel down. Hair has volume, so make sure you put this outline a few pixels away from the head on the base.
This is straight hair, so drawing the outline is quite easy: just draw two slight curves ending at the shoulders.
Flood fill your outline with the second-lightest colour. If you're using an program that has layer, and you made your hair on a different layer, you'll need to outline around the chin with that same colour before flood-filling, because the area isn't really closed.
What not to do:
For the shading (which we'll see next), do not simply draw in strands and shade around them: this will make your hair look like an inflatable mattress-not good. Also, do not ignore the strands completely, remember that hair is not made out of a single block.
What you should do is this: With the second-darkest color, shade around the hairline, and near the ears, then draw a few diagonal lines sticking out here and there
For the bottom part, shade around the neck and ears, and then, like you did before, draw a few lines of pixels sticking out, making the shading a bit jagged.
Keep shading like that with the next color, and extend the strands a bit more. You can see it's already starting to look like actual hair.
Highlights mainly go around the "crown" of the head, and near the exterior, at the bottom. Try to stick with clusters of single pixels instead of large filled areas
For the final touch, reshade in the eyebrows with the same colours as the hair. Many dollers also like to add a bit of shading to the skin under the hairline.
Final Result:
Here's the final pixel doll. The rest of the tutorials in the "For Newbies" series will show how to do the rest of her clothing and hair.