How to draw short curly hair

Short curly hair usually goes wrong in one of two ways. Either it becomes a pile of small loops drawn straight onto a bald head, so the head looks too small, or it becomes a smooth cap with a tidy outline, so it reads as a hat. Draw it as a mass with its own thickness, sitting around the skull, with an outline that is broken into small bumps.

The figures are pencil plates of head 46 from our head rotation library, pencil, a head with short, tightly coiled hair, drawn from one 3D head at the front, at 45 degrees and in profile. The plates keep their construction lines, and at 45 degrees and in profile the skull's circle shows inside the hair.

1. Draw the head without the hair

Block in the whole head first, cranium included, as if the person were bald: the ball of the skull, the brow line, the ears, the jaw. The hair sits on top of this and doesn't change it. If you start from the hair outline instead, the skull under it usually comes out too small, because the hair outline is the biggest shape on the head and feels like the head's edge. How to draw a bald head covers the shape you're drawing first.

2. Wrap the mass around the skull

Now draw the outer edge of the hair as a second shape around the first, and give it a thickness that changes around the head.

Use the ear as a ruler. On this plate the hair stands off the skull by about a quarter of the ear's height at the top, and by about a seventh of it at the back, level with the top of the ear, so the top is a little under twice as thick as the back. Lower down, the skull curves in toward the neck while the hair carries on to the nape, so the gap grows again there.

From the front the mass is much wider than the face. At the height of the temples, the hair on head 46 is about one and a half times as wide as the face between its hairline edges, and it rises above the hairline about a third of the distance from the hairline to the chin.

These numbers are one head's. Looser curls and closer crops change them, and the steps stay the same: measure the gap at the top, the gap at the back, and the width from the front on the head you're drawing.

3. Find the hairline

The hairline is where the mass meets the face. It lies on the skull, so place it from the head you drew in step 1, not from the hair's outer edge. From the front it crosses the forehead and turns down at the temples to finish just above the ears. At 45 degrees, follow it on the near side as it curves around the temple toward the front of the ear; on the far side it is barely marked. In profile it comes down from the forehead, curves back, and ends at the top of the ear's front edge.

The hairline sets the height of the forehead, which changes how old and how big the face looks. How to draw a hairline measures it on several heads.

4. Break the outline into bumps

Go around the outer edge with small, rounded bumps of uneven size, close together and small compared with the head. Pointed bumps turn the edge into a zigzag. On the front plate the line is darker at the sides of the mass and lighter along the top.

Look at the front and profile plates again: inside the mass they carry almost no texture, only the outline and the hairline, and the hair still reads as curly from the edge alone.

5. Add texture last

If you add texture inside the mass, follow the 45-degree plate: wavy strokes that run with the curve of the mass, on the side of the mass behind the temple and above the ear, with plain paper between them. From behind, where there is no face to compete with, the plates of head 46 texture the whole mass. In both, the strokes follow the round of the head, so they describe its form as well as the curls.

Three things that go wrong

Hair drawn straight onto the skull. No gap between skull and outline gives a shaved head with curls drawn on. Compare the gap at the top and at the back against your reference; on head 46 the top is the thickest part.

A smooth outline. On head 46 the outline runs close to parallel with the skull, so the mass is round. The broken edge and the extra thickness on top are what stop it from reading as a cap or a wig.

Curls drawn one by one. A head of separate, equally finished curls loses its overall shape. Draw the mass, then suggest the curls where it turns.

Practice it

Copy head 46 at the front, then at 45 degrees, then in profile, drawing the skull first each time and measuring the gap at the top and back before you draw the outline. Then draw a fourth view from memory and check it against the plate.

The head rotation library, pencil has 110 heads drawn in pencil at 22.5-degree steps, with a range of hair, short and long, straight, curly and tied back. Draw one view across several of them to see how the thickness and the hairline change from head to head.

This guide is one step in how to draw the head at any angle, which puts all the head guides in order.