15 Girl Hair Sketch Ideas to Draw
Fifteen girl hair references and the fix for the problem behind almost all of them. Flat hair is not a detail problem, it is a value problem — adding more strands makes a flat drawing busier, and it is still flat.
In this article · 23
- Pencils Paper and Tools
- How to Start With the Silhouette
- Four Textures Compared
- Shading for Volume and Depth
- Using References
- Common Mistakes That Make Hair Look Flat
- The 15 Girl Hair Sketch Ideas
- 1. Long Straight Hair With a Center Part
- 2. Beach Waves
- 3. Spiral Curls as Ribbons
- 4. 4C Coils Drawn as a Mass
- 5. High Messy Bun
- 6. Sleek Low Bun
- 7. Side Braid
- 8. Crown Braid
- 9. Space Buns
- 10. Curtain Bangs
- 11. Blunt Bob From the Side
- 12. Ponytail Mid Turn
- 13. Wind Blown Hair on a Dark Background
- 14. Waist Length Locs
- 15. Flower Crown Half Up
- Final Thoughts
Adding more strands to a flat hair drawing makes it a busier flat hair drawing.
Flatness is a value problem. Depth comes from the range between the dark core of a clump and its highlight, and a head rendered entirely in one mid grey stays flat no matter how much detail sits inside it.
Overlap does the rest. When one ribbon of hair passes in front of another, the one behind has to darken. That single decision, repeated, is what turns a shape into a mass.
Pencils Paper and Tools
A 2H, a 2B and a 6B. The 2H is for construction you plan to erase, the 2B carries the body of the hair, and the 6B goes only into the gaps between clumps.
A kneaded eraser is how you draw shine. Shade the mass evenly, then lift the highlight out in broken bands. Reserving white paper for a highlight commits you to a position before you know where the form turns.
Choose paper with a light tooth. Long hair means large areas of even mid tone, and smooth paper will not hold one without going patchy.
Keep a blending stump away from the texture. Blend the shadow of the head underneath, then lay the hair texture over it. Blending the texture itself turns clumps into fog.
How to Start With the Silhouette
Draw the outer shape before anything inside it. Hair has thickness, so the silhouette sits outside the skull line by a visible margin, and further out the tighter the curl pattern.
Squint at it before committing. At a squint the mass reduces to one grey shape, which is the only reliable way to catch a lopsided silhouette while it is still cheap to fix.
Mark the crown swirl second. Every strand travels away from that point, so it gives each later clump a reason to go where it goes.
Split the mass into four or five ribbons, no more. Those divisions become the dark cores. Starting with twenty divisions is rendering, and rendering this early is how drawings get erased.
Four Textures Compared
Straight hair is one surface and one long highlight. It hides nothing, which makes it the hardest of the four to render evenly.
Wavy hair turns between two faces. Each bend shows its outer face then its inner one, so the tone alternates down the ribbon without a single wave being outlined.
Curly hair resolves into separate ringlets. From roughly marker width down to pencil width the eye can pick out one curl at a time, and that is the range where drawing individual curls is correct.
Coily hair reads as a surface. The loops are too small to resolve, so it is shaded as a mass with detail only at the edge, and it sits darker than looser hair because tight loops trap light between them.
Shading for Volume and Depth
Every clump gets three values. A dark core, a mid body, a lifted highlight. Three values inside one shape reads as round; one value reads as a paper cutout.
The darkest tone is in the gaps. Where two clumps meet, light cannot reach, and those small deep shadows do more for depth than any amount of strand work.
The highlight crosses the clumps rather than following one. It wraps around the curve of the skull and breaks wherever a clump lifts away, which is what tells the viewer there is a sphere under the hair.
Add a second highlight where long hair curves out at the shoulder. Leaving it out is why waist-length hair so often reads as a flat cape hanging off the head.
Using References
One light source, always. A reference lit by three lamps has three highlight bands, and copying them honestly produces hair that looks moulded from chrome.
Read the reference for structure, not for strands. Find where the mass divides, where it overlaps itself and where it turns away from the light, then close the photograph and draw those decisions.
Collect the same style from several angles. A back view will tell you where the crown swirl sits, which a front view can never show you.
Trace nothing you intend to publish. A photograph is somebody else's copyright even when you have redrawn it in pencil, and a traced outline is easy to recognise.
Common Mistakes That Make Hair Look Flat
No value range. Everything rendered in mid grey. This is the single biggest cause and it is invisible until you photograph the drawing in black and white.
Overlaps drawn at the same tone. When two clumps cross, one must go darker. Leaving both equal collapses the whole crossing.
An unbroken highlight band. Real shine is interrupted by every clump it passes over.
Even spacing. Waves that crest at exactly the same point across the head read as corrugated iron rather than as hair.
Strands added before tone. They land in the wrong place, and erasing them takes the tone with them.
The 15 Girl Hair Sketch Ideas
1. Long Straight Hair With a Center Part
Straight hair has nothing to hide behind, so the only depth available comes from the difference between the near bank and the far one. Darken the shadow-side bank by a full value step right at the parting and the head turns from a flat oval into a form in one stroke.
2. Beach Waves
A wave is a repeat, and a repeat drawn at even intervals reads as a printed pattern rather than as hair. Stagger the bend positions between neighbouring ribbons so no two crests line up across the mass, which is exactly what stops loose waves looking machine made.
3. Spiral Curls as Ribbons
Treat a spiral as a flat ribbon wound around an invisible tube, so you see the outer face, then the thin edge, then the inner face. Shade those three states in sequence down the curl and the spiral appears without a single loop being outlined.
4. 4C Coils Drawn as a Mass
Coils are too small for the eye to separate, so the correct drawing is a shaded surface with detail reserved for the silhouette. Push the interior darker than feels comfortable, because a tight pattern traps light between its loops and genuinely sits darker than looser hair of the same shade.
5. High Messy Bun
Height is the point, so the bun sits above the skull line with visible air beneath where it lifts. Draw the shadowed gap between the tie and the ball of hair, since that gap is the only thing proving the bun is a separate object rather than a shape drawn onto the head.
6. Sleek Low Bun
Every strand is pulled in the same direction, so the drawing is mostly long converging lines with one hard highlight riding the curve of the skull. Keep the knot small, low and crisply outlined, because sleekness reads as edge quality far more than as smoothness of tone.
7. Side Braid
A braid is a stack of teardrops alternating left and right, each one tucking under the next. Darken the tuck point where every teardrop disappears beneath its neighbour, because that small repeated shadow is the entire source of a braid's depth.
8. Crown Braid
Sitting across the top of the head, the braid is seen from above, so you are drawing the top plane of each wedge rather than its face. Foreshorten the wedges as they travel around and run the highlight along the top of the braid instead of down its centre.
9. Space Buns
Two identical objects invite symmetry, and symmetry flattens a head instantly. Draw one bun slightly larger and further forward than the other, then sweep tension lines up from a centre part so both are clearly anchored to the same scalp rather than stuck on afterwards.
10. Curtain Bangs
Curtain bangs are two ribbons that split at the centre and sweep outward, longest where they meet the rest of the hair. Give each a soft inward curve near the cheek and keep the roots lifted at the part, since flat roots collapse the sweep into an ordinary blunt fringe.
11. Blunt Bob From the Side
In profile the bob is a strong silhouette with a hard bottom line and a visible curve at the back of the skull. Push the tone darkest just under the jaw where the hair turns away from the light, and a flat side panel becomes a curved surface.
12. Ponytail Mid Turn
Movement is drawn with lag, so the tail trails behind the direction of the turn instead of lining up with it. Fan the ends outward and keep the root tight at the tie, which makes the whole tail read as one mass being dragged through the air rather than a shape posed in it.
13. Wind Blown Hair on a Dark Background
Against a dark ground the drawing inverts, and hair is defined by a light rim on its edges rather than by dark lines. Lift the outer strands to near white and let the interior sink almost to the background value, which is what backlighting genuinely does to a moving mass.
14. Waist Length Locs
At waist length the locs need staggered ends and varied thickness or the whole mass turns into a striped rectangle. Let some cross in front of others and darken every one that passes behind, because overlap is the only depth cue a shape that long really offers.
15. Flower Crown Half Up
Flowers are hard edged and light, hair is soft edged and mid toned, and the contrast between them carries the picture. Tuck a few blooms partly behind strands instead of sitting them all on top, which is what places the crown into the hair rather than on the surface of the page.
Final Thoughts
Photograph a finished drawing in black and white and look at it small. If the whole head reads as one grey shape, no amount of strand work will save it — the fix is deeper cores in the gaps and a brighter lifted highlight across the form. Value first, overlap second, strands last.
For curly textures specifically see 15 ways to sketch curly hair easily. More in Hair Drawing. See also the anime version.
