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Well, with that over, hello and welcome to my hair tutorial!   Why anyone would want to spend as long on hair as I do is beyond me, but due to popular demand here it is! :D   In Technicolor too!   Now go to the restroom and get some popcorn... this might take a while oO.

Step 1: Make sure that you have the color laid down for the whole picture.   Your hair needs to be in its OWN layer with transparency preserved before you can do anything...

Step 2: For the next step you'll want to start adding your shadows and stuff like that.  Until you add highlights, stay on the same layer - This is only MY method though! I also tend to have both my mid color and my shadow as the selected palette colors so that I can teeter between the two to fix mistakes.   Remember to have lots of points in the hair and NOT blobs, as illustrated in the example images.   For the most part I follow the contour of the hair, but I don't always make my lines fade to a point.  Effective use of your brain is essential here...

Step 3: Don't forget - Objects that lay over the hair will cast a shadow.   I usually add these shadows before the hair contour shadows like I did in the image on the left.

Step 4: Yay, we're done with shadows... or so it appears for now at least!  XD    By this point I usually find that I am dissatisfied with the colors or the difference between light and dark in the image... so I often play with either hue/saturation or contrast/brightness.   You should do this too until the image is completely to your liking.  You could even make the blonde hair blue, brown, etc - these quick tools are the reason my colors change so much when I work on pictures!

Step 5: Now make sure that your brush is set to Other Dynamics (i.e. with Shape Dynamics turned OFF!).  If you have a pressure-sensitive tablet, change the opacity jitter control to pen pressure.  If you don't, play around with the fade option instead.   It takes a lot of work, but it IS possible to do it with a mouse...  just don't get mad at me though, because its really not easy!

Once you are done with the options, start alternating between the colors, picking areas that you want to be soft.  Its up to you what you want soft and what you want sharp, but I usually fade points and curves, leaving fairly straight edges alone.

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