Doodled Hair

I often get asked how to draw faces, and sadly there is no quick way, it takes a lot of practice. But this does not mean you have to create faceless art, here is a simple but very effective way to create a doodle portrait without having to draw the face. 

First grab some magazines and look for medium sized faces..

Select the one you like and cut out just the face, only the skin and ear if it is showing...no hair, no clothes.. Glue to a piece of smooth card. The piece I used is 160gsm. Use a pencil at first to sketch in some clothes and hair, they do not have to be like the original...Go wild, invent a fabulous new hairstyle...be a fashion designer and give her some great clothes. 

Now take your markers and colour in the shapes. What you are creating at this point is just a background, so it does not need to be super neat, or even well blended.  I used 3 pinks for the clothing, 3 blues and 3 turquoises for the hair. Always work in 3's, a light,mid and dark tone of the same hue. 

You can see I outlined the magazine area, on the side near the hair I used a thicker line, and on the outer side of the face I used a narrow line. You really don't want a thick black outline on that side of the face. I also took a blue-grey and outlines the whole image, and then using black I added a border to the edge of the card. 

The ideal pens to use for the outlines, and for the later doodling are the LETRASET FINELINERS

I started my doodling, varying the thickness of pen, from a 0.1mm right up to the 0.7mm, this gives me delicate areas and thicker darker areas. 

Think about  the area you are filling in, for clothing try and think of patterns that will make the area look like fabric. For the hair try and find curvy, round patterns.... unless of course you give your model spikey hair in which case use straight lines in your doodles.

For the background I used a very simple cross hatching pattern. Once that was done, there was too much white still showing so I added the grey circles into the background. 

Here is the finished piece, an easy doodled portrait, and no tricky faces to draw..

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