How to Draw Hair in Procreate

Drawing hair can seem daunting but whether you want to draw long, short, straight, or curly hair we are going to show you how you can get the job done. In this tutorial, we are using a Procreate Chalk brush and hair Procreate color palettes. I would highly recommend using a texture brush to help when drawing hair.

We have a great selection of Procreate texture brushes for you to use. Before we get started we will need to install the Procreate brushes. We are also utilizing the clipping mask function in Procreate. We have a great in-depth tutorial on using clipping masks in Procreate if needed.

Please note: we are using the latest version of Procreate 5X. If you do not see a feature mentioned below, make sure your Procreate is up-to-date.

Step 1 - Sketch out the shape

Making a rough sketch of a person and their hair is one of the most important steps you want to do. This will help you with not only determining where the hair should go but also help you visualize the flow of the hair and where dark and lighter areas of the hair are.

Step 2 - Make a hair base

Going to the “Layers” panel, we want to add a new layer for our “Hair base”. This will be the main color you will use to build on to, adding darker and lighter strands.

With the new layer created, select the color for the base. Using the “Script” brush to outline the shape of the hair and fill it in with the same color, making a solid shape of the hair.

Step 3 - Add base undertones

We are going to add some dark undertones to support our base color. We want to make sure we keep this on a separate layer and use the clipping mask function. This will allow us to add color to the hair base and still make corrections if needed without touching the hair base.

I’ve gone ahead and brought in my reference photo to help. Using an almost black color I started drawing curls all over and in the direction of the hair flow.

Step 3 - Add layers of color

In this step, we are going to layer for layer add a shade of color to build it up to a completed look. We aren’t using clipping masks for this step, as we want some of our curls to go over the base shape. We are also changing the brush to “Thin” to make the individual strands/sections of the hair.

Mid Tones:

Create a new layer and add your Mid-tone colors, which are an in-between shade of the base and support colors. I opted to go with this grey color which I’ll make edits to later. Make sure that each strand/section of hair that your draw flows in the same direction as your reference.

Deep Tones:

Create a new layer above the mid-tones and add your deep colors, which will add more depth. Starting in the hair side part I started drawing the curly strands/sections keeping the flow of the hair. You will see that I took most strokes past the base shape to create more texture and shape like the reference photo.

Dark top Tones:

With a new layer add your dark top tones, keeping the curl shape and flow of hair. This will add a bit more fullness and give the illusion of depth. This layer is the last color that we will be adding to the hair.

Step 4 - Making adjustments

If you want to adjust or fix one of the color layers this is when to do it. We are going to work with layer opacity and blend modes on the mid and deep tones layers. You can change the colors of your layers, but I prefer to adjust the layers to get some nifty effects that you can’t get when changing colors.

Going into the “Layers” panel select a color layer that you want to lower the opacity of. I am selecting my “Mid tones” layer and tapping on the (N) to show opacity and blend modes. I’m only lowering the opacity to 32% to reduce the intensity of the color.

Next, I’m selecting my “Deep tones” layer and set the layer blend mode to darken.

Feel free to make additional adjustments and add or remove more color layers to complete your hair look.

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to draw hair in Procreate. Remember to work with layers and work in the direction that the hair flows. If you liked this tutorial make sure to check out our guide on how to draw people in Procreate.