MoonDreamer Hair Tutorial

Although I have written this tutorial for Paint Shop Pro, any program that support layers, like Adobe Photoshop, Serif Photoplus, Corel Photopaint or Ulead PhotoImpact, can be used. It does assume that you are familiar with whichever graphic program you are using.

1. Start with your completed doll that you want to add the hair to (or just a base if you prefer adding them first).	2. Create a new layer named Fringe (if you are American, this would be bangs). Set your foreground colour to a medium shade of the colour you want the hair to be. In this case, I am using #948ED0.	3. With the Paintbrush tool, draw the outline of the front sections of hair. I'm not going for realism here!

4. Neaten up the outline with the Eraser and Paintbrush tool, make sure that the curves look nice and smooth. Generally speaking, the line should be 1 pixel thick in all places.	5. Flood Fill the front sections of hair with a slightly lighter shade of the outline colour. I am using #A5A0D8	6. Select the outline colour again and, with the Paintbrush tool, draw strands of hair on the front sections to give it some detail.

7. On the sections of hair which curve "out", add a thicker outline to make it look like shadow.	8. Select the Retouch tool. Use the settings as above. You may need to alter these depending on the size of your doll, but this is a good place to start.	9. Carefully darken the sections of hair which go "in", as shown above. It is very easy to overdo this, so go slowly and Zoom Out frequently to check what it looks like. You can always add more later if needed.

10. Change the Retouch tool to Lighten and match the settings above.	11. Lighten the hair on the sections that go "out", as shown above.	12. Now, this looks ok, but it's a bit flat. To really make it look good, change the setting on the Retouch tool to Smudge and use the values above.

13. Using the smudge tool, smudge strands of light hair into the dark sections and strands of dark into the light. Be careful when you do this, you want the definition on the strands, not just a smudged mess. In the image above, I have smudged the left side, but not the right.	14. Your hair should look something like this so far.	15. Create a new layer called Back Hair behind the layer called Fringe. Select a slightly darker shade of the initial outline colour and draw in the rest of the hair.

16.Again, clean up the edges of the hair.	17. Fill the inside of the hair with the original outline colour (from step 2). You will probably need to use a combination of the Paintbrush tool and the Flood Fill tool.	18. Use the darker outline colour to draw in the strands of hair.

19. Using the Retouch tool set to Darken with the setting from step 8, add shading to the rest of the hair. As well as the "dips" in the waves, add shading where that section of hair is behind another, as shown above.	20. Now use the settings from step 10 and add hightlight as shown above.	21. Use the Smudge tool with the setting from step 12 and smudge the highlights and shadows to create more definition.

For the final touch, add a little shading around the face. Your hair is complete!
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