Hair Brushes

I am not a big fan of illustrating hair. It has the tendency to command all of your attention and you start to ignore other parts of the illustration. When you finally finish it just makes the rest of the illustration look and feel done, which is why a lot of vector artists leave the hair for the end of the project. So I was looking for a quicker and easier way to illustrate hair so I started experimenting with brushes in Adobe Illustrator. Here are some tips:

I know I am not the first one to write about this. In fact, one of my favorite tuts can be found here. I am more of a flat designer so I changed the idea to suit my needs, but this is one of the best vector hair tutorials on the web, and is great at showing how to make your own brushes. Once I made my brush I could just draw the strands on with the pen tool then apply the brush settings. Here are my final results:

If you don't want to make your own brushes you can buy them online, but I suggest trying to make your own. Not only do you get the learning benefit but the mistakes and experiments make some really beautiful vector art. I'll show you more examples of that in an upcoming post.