https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHX2CJUaD9A&t=1s

Hi guys, so in today's video I'm going to be showing you how I go about drawing braids. I remember how difficult I used to find this before I had a set method of doing it and I remember the way I learned back when I was trying to learn how to draw braids was I used to use, I watched Bailey J's video on it and I used the zigzag method that she used and that's the way I did it for a long time. Before I did that I used to draw braids like this so I would go ahead and make lots of shapes like that and then just have the hair at the end like that and I would draw strands across it and it ended up not looking very realistic at all. It didn't look anything like how a braid should look but the moment I thought about a braid in shapes that's what made it so much easier for me to understand how to draw it. So I'm going to break this down for you and hopefully make it as easy as possible for you to understand because it is quite hard to get your head around at first but once you've worked it out then you're basically sorted. Okay so if we look at this image of a braid you have to think about it in terms of the shapes that make up a braid. So I'm going to go ahead and turn the opacity down of this a little bit just so I can kind of trace over the shape and hopefully make it more clear to you how the braid works. So you've got your first strand coming in here this first chunk of hair goes underneath this strand because this is a regular three strand braid so then this will go here then this strand carries on underneath that next one comes out again and goes under again here and under again here and under again here. So that's this strand so I'm going to go ahead and colour code each strand as I go along just so it's really easy to see but you have to remember that when you make a braid you're using three strands and basically wrapping them around each other so when you draw a braid you have to think about it in the way of how you actually went about making a braid. I feel like I just explained that in my stupid. So using the same mindset you would use if you were braiding someone's hair so starting with the three strands you think about the three strands when you're drawing a braid. I don't really have to do this so much anymore because I'm used to drawing braids but when you're not quite so used to it a good way to think about it is if you were to imagine you were braiding somebody's hair and thinking about the fact that there are three different strands and each of them are overlapping each other and when you get like a picture of hair and you break it down like this and you work out okay so this strand is going over this strand and this strand is going over that strand it makes it a lot easier for you to understand how it works. I accidentally forgot to draw it here let me just go over that. We've got two of the strands drawn out now now for a final layer we're going to draw the other strand of the braid. So those are all the different aspects of this braid broken down into colours so each one of the three strands of hair that would have been started with when this lady's hair was braided are each coded as red green and purple so that's how they all end up overlapping over one another so you're left with these basic shapes so now if you were to go ahead and apply this to a drawing if we want her to have braids at the side I would start by making the hair go down here and then we're going to start breaking down the different shapes so there's one shape first like this then you're going to have your next lot of hair overlapping over that you have to keep thinking overlaps and that there next lot to overlap and another overlap and then the hair will come out at the end maybe not that much hair I think realistically it would probably be something like that so if I turn down the opacity of that a little bit you can then go ahead and draw over this so if you add lines of the hair going in the direction that it's going in that also helps to make it look a little bit more realistic another thing to note is this is actually not very good looking drawing of a braid because it's kind of following a really straight line whereas in actuality you can think of it as like a long tube because it's going over her shoulder it'll probably end up curving in this kind of direction following this shape so when you don't draw your braid you might want to follow a curved kind of path but the whole reason I didn't do that was just for demonstration purposes just to show you guys essentially how to go about starting the hair so what I'm going to do next is show you how to draw a braid to look fairly realistic and how to paint it as well so we're going to start with what we did before which is break down the shapes but if if you want to go one step further in preparing yourself for the braid and actually draw the path that it's going to follow like the motion path it's going to follow I think I'm going to go for this kind of motion because I think it will look quite interesting and I'm not drawing the rest of the head so our first chunk of hair will come in about here and draw the shape of that and our next chunk kind of come down a little bit and overlap around it then the next lot will wrap around that and this continuous process of these strands wrapping around each other it's just going to keep happening and you're going to follow the path that's been set remember braids are always thicker towards the top and they kind of thin out as you get towards the bottom or at least they do in my hair because I have layers in my hair there we go turn the opacity of that down and we're going to go ahead and do the proper drawing over the top in the end of it you can make curly if you want or you could just use make it like regular kind of straight hair and there you go you've drawn a basic braid okay so I know that I want this braid to be an ombre braid I want it to be a brown to lilac lilac blue kind of ombre braid what I'm going to do now is I'm going to click on preserve opacity this will make sure when I draw in the braid it won't go outside the lines now I'm going to set this layer of line I'm going to turn down the opacity a little bit then I'm going to start by coloring it in I'm going to find the kind of brown that I want for the hair kind of like this brown so now that the base colors are in we want to add the shadows so I'm going to go ahead and select kind of a purple kind of color and I'm going to set this to multiply and I'm going to click clipping group because I want this to clip to the color layer below I'm going to use an airbrush and I'm going to fill in all the areas that I want there to be shadows turning down the opacity just a little bit so anywhere where it goes underneath and wraps under a bit of hair you're going to want that to have shadows then I'm going to go ahead and in a luminosity layer using a light yellow this I'm going to make the shines and when I do this I'm going to make this a bit of a jaggedy uneven kind of shine using a dark purple again this time I'm only going to turn the opacity to about here just so we have even more shading you're going to use this very sparingly these are all the very localized shadows so just use these kind of shadows in the corners of the braids now we've got all the basic kind of shapes down and everything next I'm going to get my acrylic paint brush tool this will basically be any kind of brush tool and paint tool so I'm going to turn my density up a little bit turn down the size a little bit so what's going to happen is I'm going to start off with the I'll make sure you merge down your line art for this as well everything has to be on all one layer so I'm going to take my darkest shade and I'm going to start drawing in some dark strands so there we go there's a really kind of basic version of what we want this braid to look like but we're nowhere near done yet we've still got quite a few things we need to do and as you can see I haven't done a very good job on the bottom of the braid either I already think it's a little bit too big so I'm going to go ahead and thin it out a little bit just kind of make the ends look a little bit less weird hopefully don't worry this will all be fixed by the end of the video okay so what we're going to do next is we're going to add a little bit more well what I would call more kind of flyaway hairs so I'm going to turn down the density of my brush to do this and the blending so what you're going to do is using a kind of smaller brush than this we're going to kind of add the messy strands of hair that kind of stick out a little bit all the loose kind of flyaways and I know this happens with my hair a lot because because of the layers I have in my hair I always have bits that end up sticking out of my plait and it's very annoying and then we're going to make a new luminosity layer and I'm going to use my airbrush to do this so when I do this because I'm using paint tool sai this gives me a little bit of an advantage because whenever I try and do this in Krita I can't actually recreate the same kind of look because in paint tool sai I use two textures called groogy and jizzy and I'm not really sure where I got them from but I use these two textures um let me just check if that's high enough now we could probably do with upping the textures a little bit more and that what that does is it gives a little kind of texture to my brush like this and I really like that because it adds texture to the highlight you'll see what I mean when I add it on so I'm going to start adding in some strands focusing the luminosity and the brush on the middle bit of the strand but there will be strands that go down as well so that's without the luminosity and that's with the luminosity layer merge that down then we're going to go ahead and use another multiply layer I'm going to use this to basically just kind of enhance the shadows even further tone down the opacity of this a lot but yeah that's basically it and then you've been and then at this point you've drawn a braid I hope you found this tutorial helpful in some way I'm hoping to do a tutorial on hair in general soon so if you would like to see a hair tutorial let me know and I'll see you in my next video bye guys