Step-by-Step colouring of Tilda's curly hair

Hello lovely bloggers, I have a little colouring tute to share today, but first some nice news.....I am being featured today on a fabulous blog called Craft Corners in their 'Best of the Web' section. The blog is about all sorts of handicrafts, not just papercrafting, and it has some great ideas that I wouldn't mind trying myself. Nice if you want a browse round a new site sometime, it's the kind of place I like mooching around in when I can't sleep. There are a few other bloggers featured in this edition, too: a quilter, a mixed-media artist and a stitcher.

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I've been colouring again. My good friend, the lovely Chrissy, sent me a Tilda image and asked how I would colour her very curly hair. I had no idea how to and I put it on the back burner of my mind to think over......for about a year or two! Anyway, in the mood to play recently, I found the image she sent me and decided to sit down and see if I could do something with it at last. I promised her I'd take some step-by-step photos and here they are.

I used this image recently to make a gift box...you can see the blog post about this box by clicking HERE.

This Tilda looks as though she has African American hair, or at least very very tight curls, so my usual hair techniques would not work here. This is how I planned and coloured the image.

Such tightly curly hair is a mass of darkness, which I decided I'd colour using E47 as my main colour with E49 as shadows, but to begin I needed to define some curls - I decided to colour the curls with a lighter edge to define them from the rest of her hair.




Step 1
I began by mapping out some curls by using a lighter-coloured marker - I'm guessing and feeling my way at this point so if I make a mistake it won't be such a big deal because I'll be coming in with a darker colour soon. The drawing of the hair is made up of lots of curves, and I'll be using these as the curls. Leaving the outer edge of the curves uncoloured, I laid down some E35 in all the areas that are going to be coloured darker later:

Mapping out with a lighter marker

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Step 2
When I'm happy with where the curls are, so I go in with the colour I want her hair to be: E47. I put this ink in exactly the same places where I mapped out my trial colouring, but if you are more confident you could miss out the mapping stage and go straight in with your main hair colour:

Laying down main colour

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Step 3
Next, I take my deeper hair colour that I am going to use for shadows (E49), and I add some to small parts of the image: round the bows and on the outside of the curves within the hair. This will give some depth to the image and accentuate the curls:

Adding some shadow areas

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Step 4
Then I go back in with my main colour (E47) and blend in the shadows:

Blending the shadows

You can see that I did the 2 sides of her hair in different ways: on the left side I used the E47 minimally to blend in the shadow areas, and on the right side I actually coloured over the whole of the E47 area. At this point, I didn't know which side I preferred, remember I'm working this out as I go along.

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Step 5
OK, so after this I want to add some colour to the curls themselves, so I use the paler colour E35 on the white areas only, I didn't blend in with the darker colour as I didn't want the highlight to get lost at this point:

Giving the curls some colour

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Step 6
Now, at this point I switched to a dotted stroke for 2 reasons: as the image is now quite dark, it's harder to be precise about where the dark marker tip lands (for me anyway, maybe my eyesight isn't so great but I can't distinguish the end of a dark marker tip against dark colouring) so a dot is safer.....less ink comes out and less chance of messing up. PLUS dotted strokes add to the textured feel of the hair.

So, I dot some of the darkest marker (E49) into the shadows again to deepen and extend them:

Dotting to add in and extend the shadows

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Step 7
And then I dot some of the main (E47) colour around to blend the dark dots and add more colour:

More dots to blend

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Step 8
I'm not happy with the curls - there is too much E35 showing and I want to reduce the size of the highlighted areas. I take another colour, E44, and dot this around, extending into the highlight areas to make them smaller:

Reducing the highlights with a shade slightly lighter than
the main hair colour

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Step 9
I could have stopped at this point as I'm happy enough with it. But I decided to take my E44 marker and again added some dots over and around the curls to tone them down a little, and you can see the result of this in the finished image below. The hair is still warmer because of the E35, but gives more the effect I was hoping for.

Here is the finished image:

Hope this was of some use. Please let me know if you use it - I'd love to come and see your work.

Happy colouring!