How to draw hair: six short and tied-back cuts compared

Our hair guides cover six cuts, each on its own head. They measure different things, but they share a start and a finish: draw the bald head first, draw the hair as a shape over it, and end with a few strokes inside. In between, each guide measures the hair against two rulers the head already gives you, the face and the ear. This page puts those measurements side by side so you can see what changes from one cut to the next. It covers short and tied-back hair; long hair doesn't have a guide yet.

The six heads come from our head rotation library, pencil, which draws each head from one 3D head at 22.5-degree steps.

Six heads at 45 degrees. Top row, left to right: short sides (head 100), swept-up (head 59), wavy (head 72). Bottom row: curly (head 46), bob (head 20), bun (head 106). On a phone they run two to a row in the same order.

The figure is for comparing shapes. The numbers below were measured on the front and profile plates in each cut's own guide, and each one belongs to that head alone: it is a ratio against that head's own face or ear, so it tells you the proportion, never a size.

1. Draw the bald head first

Block in the ball of the cranium, the brow line, the ears, the jaw and the neck before any hair. The outline of the hair is the biggest shape on the head, so it is easy to read it as the head's edge. Start from it and the skull comes out too small, the hair loses its thickness, and the face and ears get placed against the wrong shape. All six guides start here, and how to draw a bald head covers the shape.

2. In profile: how far the hair stands off the skull

Measured against the ear's height, three of the guides take the gap between the skull and the hair's outline:

Almost on the skull: pulled-back hair, about a sixteenth of the ear's height outside it at the top and the back (head 40, one of three buns in the bun guide; the figure shows head 106).
A little off: short wavy hair, about a seventh of the ear above the skull's circle on top (head 72), with only the front sweep lifting well off the head.
Well off: short curly hair, about a quarter of the ear on top and a seventh at the back (head 46).

With short sides the top is a tall mass and the sides and back follow the head closely (head 100). Swept-up hair has no gap measured in its guide.

3. From the front: width and height against the face

From the front, the ruler is the face. Width first:

At the brow, head 20's bob is a little over one and a half times as wide as the face. Head 72's wavy hair, just below the hairline, and head 46's curls, at the temples, measure about the same.
With short sides, just above the ear the hair beside the face is only about a tenth as wide as the face (head 100).

Then height. Place the hairline from the bald head, since it sits on the skull, then measure the hair above it. On head 72 the top of the hair sits about one and a fifth times the forehead's height above the hairline, on head 100 about one and a tenth. Head 59 is measured by its hairline instead: about three quarters of a face-third above the brow, lower than usual, so the forehead looks short. How to draw a hairline measures the hairline on several heads.

4. Around the ear

All six heads in the figure show their ears. Four of the guides measure how the hair meets the ear:

Short sides end in front of the ear in a short sideburn, cut square about a third of the way down the ear (head 100).
Swept-up hair passes over the top of the ear and runs forward and up to the temple, with bare face below and no sideburn (head 59).
Wavy hair dips in front of the ear to about a quarter of its height below the top, then curves up over it (head 72).
The bob is tucked behind the ears, so from the front its outline runs outside them (head 20).

Where the hair really does cover the ears on your reference, draw the ears anyway and lay the hair over them, so the head keeps its size underneath.

5. At the back: where the hair ends

Carry the bottom of the ear back across the head and measure where the hair stops below it:

Short sides end at the nape around the level of the bottom of the ear (head 100).
Swept-up hair ends about half an ear's height below it (head 59).
Wavy hair ends nearly three quarters of an ear's height below it (head 72).
The bob's bottom edge is the line that makes it a bob. Just behind the ear it sits about a third of an ear below the lobe line, drops to about half partway back, then curves up to about the level of the lobe (head 20).
On the bun guide's three low buns, the bottom of the bun hangs a quarter to a half of the ear's height below the lobe, and its top is level with the top of the ear or a little above.

6. The outline

With the measurements placed, draw the outline in a few long lines, then change it to suit the hair. Swept-up hair keeps it smooth, and short sides keep crisp lines at the sideburn and behind the ear. Wavy hair breaks it into lobes of uneven size, bigger over the forehead. Curly hair gets small rounded bumps, close together. A bob gets short, uneven ends along the bottom edge. A bun is two shapes, the hair pulled tight over the skull and the bun behind it, with a small corner where the skull's outline meets the top of the bun.

On the wavy, curly and bob outlines, keep the breaks uneven, since even ones read as a pattern.

7. A few strokes inside

Inside the shape, a few long strokes show which way the hair lies: S-shaped on wavy hair, running back toward the bun on pulled-back hair, falling from the crown to the bottom edge on a bob. Leave much of the shape as plain paper. In the swept-up guide's words, a shape filled with strokes reads as thick hair; in the wavy guide's, filling every gap flattens the mass into texture.

Three things that go wrong

A hat. A smooth, even outline at one thickness all round reads as a cap on wavy, curly or bob hair. Check how far the hair stands off the skull, and break the outline.

No skull under the hair. Hair drawn straight onto the head, or a head drawn from the hair's outline, both lose the gap between the two, so draw the bald head first.

Ears left out. Hair that covers the ears tempts you to skip them, and the head loses its size under the hair. Place the ears, then decide what the hair does around them.

Practice it

Copy the six heads at 45 degrees from the figure. For each one, draw the skull first, then the outline. Then open its guide, copy its front and profile plates, and take the measurements on them:

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.

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