Fairy's Hair

STEP 6
Fairy's Hair - Fairy hair can be really fantastical. Fairies often have foliage and flowers sprouting from their heads, creating lovely and unusual hair. And if you combine that with remarkable ears, earrings, eyes, wings, and so forth, a fairy can be very stunning.

So I’ll attempt to draw this fairy’s hair in its natural state. You may have noticed that I’ve created a more definite light source now – coming from the right side of the picture. So everything there is more lit with light, and the left side falls into the shadows. The hair, too, will look a little muted when it’s shadowed. For much of the hair I created only a suggestion of the foliage, or else it would look over-kill detailed. She already has detailed eyes and ears.

To make the hair, I first rubbed in the entire shaded side on the left. This is done by rubbing the lead of a thick, dark carpenter’s pencil on a piece of sandpaper to powderize it. Then I wrap a piece of chamois cloth, or even a facial tissue, around my fingers. (Sometimes I use a cotton ball instead). Dip it into the pencil powder and first rub a little on a scrap paper to remove the excess powder. Then start shading in the left side, fading the shading out lighter and lighter, as it moves toward the right side.

When the background is as dark as I wanted it, I begin drawing the hair on top of the background.

As with the other parts of the drawing, I draw in the fairy hair with both a basic mechanical pencil, and also a hard-leaded drawing pencil. The hard-leaded pencil will not fade if I rub it with my finger for shading purposes. So I use it for lines I don't want to get disturbed. When I want some of the lines to be softer and blended, I draw those in with my favorite cheap mechanical pencil, which softens very smoothly when rubbed with a tissue, finger, Q-tip, paper stomp, etc.

When the lines and blending are done, I then make highlights on the flower petals and some leaves by erasing out areas with my kneaded eraser. Most of the highlights appear on the right side where the light source comes from. The foliage in the shadows gets only a little.

Next – Either the fairy wings, or a bit of simple costuming around the shoulders and lower neck. We’ll see.

Mary