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Hair Techniques In this tutorial I want to cover some basic techniques for drawing and shading hair (be it realistic, anime etc). 
Firstly, poor hair. What makes hair look poorly drawn? A number of things. The most common problem beginners seem to have is to try to draw hair TOO detailed - drawing each strand of hair. Instead it's easier to try to see hair as one overall shape, divided into smaller shapes of light and shadow and/or clumps of hair. In addition hair is not always properly placed on the head.
Placing the hair properly on the head makes a big difference in how the person looks. As you can see from the example the eyes are approximately halfway down the head (see the eye drawing
tutorial for more about eye placement) and the hair COVERS part of the head/face. A common mistake is to draw the hair sitting "on top" of the head, instead of covering at
least part of the head.
Okay so... looking at good hair shapes. For example braids are easy to see the shapes in and to divide up. Most other styles of hair can be draw as a series of shapes too. If you have trouble see the shapes in hair try squinting when looking at a real person's hair... or blur a photo on the computer to look at it. Ignoring the color you should be able to see the lights and darks and overall shape of the hair.
One key thing I've learned about shading hair is HOW you move your hand.
Plant your hand pretty firmly on the paper and flick your fingers. This will allow you to create a series of lines that are pretty much all the same direction etc. and create more convincing, less tangled looking hair.
Now, about shading hair. Hair isn't flat, it has waves and shapes and reflections... even straight hair does. In these examples I show dark to light. Also an easy to way do the strands of hair in a wave or curl is to use the hand movement shown above to shade the top of a hair section, then flip the paper around and do the same movements for the bottom half.
Of course these are just basic techniques, with practice you can develop your own methods.
One last tip for creating hair is to shade the hair as shown above. Then cut a piece of eraser to form a wedge. You can use the erase wedge to erase sharp, light highlights into the hair.
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