While they’re focused on drawing by hand, the wikiHow articles on drawing anime hair and drawing manga hair are good resources for choosing hairstyles and sketching outlines. Anime hair is often jagged or spiky, or sometimes curly and flowing, but it’s always noticeable!
You can also add a touch of color here—purple-gray, for example, is a popular choice for anime. Alternatively, choose a shade of gray that incorporates some of the color you’ll use for the character’s clothing or accessories.
Adding some areas of shine (due to light reflection) will make your areas of shading that much more impactful.
For instance, say your character has spiky bangs that look like shark teeth. In this case, shade in along the line art to fill the tip and right edge of each “tooth” with a dark gray color. This process is going to take some time if your anime hairstyle has a lot of individual layers, strands, curls, etc. But wait until you see the results! Keep referring to the location of your light source as you decide where to add shading.
But use a “less is more” approach here—keep the shine areas to less than about 10% of the total hairstyle. If your character has a light skin tone, choose that same color here; if they have a darker skin tone, choose a light shade in the same color family. If your character has soft or straight bangs (instead of jagged ones), blend in a bit of the skin tone to help ease the transition between hair and skin.
If you’re drawing hair for manga (Japanese-style graphic novels), you’ll find many stylistic similarities with anime (which most specifically refers to Japanese-style animated films).
Applying more pressure creates a darker shading with the same pencil. If you’re using a set of graphite drawing pencils, soft pencils (labeled with a “B”) work best for shading. The higher the number (4B, 5B, 6B, etc. ), the darker the shading. The shade scale doesn’t have to be strictly white-to-black with shades of gray between them. If you want your anime hair to have, for instance, a purple-gray element to it, add this color range to your scale.
Choose a starting shade color that’s about halfway between the left end and the center of your shade scale.
Use an eraser or smudge stick to reduce the appearance of hatching in the reflective areas. Blend in some of the character’s flesh tone color (or a lighter shade of the flesh tone color) in the reflective areas as well as along the bangs.
This shading represents the darkest you want the hair to be (other than the line art that defines the shape and structure of the hairstyle). Don’t make it fully black (like the line art) unless you want your character to have a jet black hairstyle.
Especially when you’re shading by hand (as opposed to digitally), it’s easier to darken shading that’s too light than to lighten shading that’s too dark. Err toward making your black hair shading a little lighter than you think you want it, then add more dark layering as needed to get the proper shading.
