How to Draw Hair in Procreate: Chunks First, Lines Last

Hair is where most portraits fall apart. You start drawing individual strands, the lines pile up, and twenty minutes later the head looks like a bird's nest. In Portrait Academy, Freya's approach flips the order completely: big chunks first, direction second, and the fine lines only at the very end.

"Many of you might wonder how I draw hair that looks soft and beautiful. I will tell you my secret. Actually, I don't use many techniques. It's very easy. But you need to use your intuition a little and be patient."

Freya, in the Portrait Academy chapter "Trace: Women's Hair"

Here's her full process, for women's hair and men's, drawn from three chapters of the course.

Step 1: Measure Before You Draw

Freya starts every hairstyle with a circle for the head, then measures the hair against it. She counts in head-sized parts: this hairstyle falls almost two parts below the chin, that one rises about half a part above the skull.

She jokes about artists holding a paintbrush at arm's length to measure a model, and admits she only understood that trick after graduating, having survived university on intuition. The lesson under the joke is real though: before any hair line, know how long and how wide the whole mass is.

Step 2: Draft the Chunks, Not the Strands

Add a layer named Draft 1. Freya uses her Eaglehawk brush in a bright color for outlines, so the draft stays clearly separate from the reference.

Now the core idea: look at the hair as chunks. A section that falls over the shoulder is one chunk. The layer that sweeps across the forehead is another. Freya draws each chunk as a simple closed-ish shape and deliberately ignores everything small.

Two warnings from the lessons, both about what NOT to do:

• Don't start from the outer hairline and work in. Freya says drawing the outline edge first makes hair look rigid, like a wig sitting on the head. Layers first, silhouette second.
• Don't draw a straight middle line down a lock of hair. It makes the hair look stiff and, in her word, amateur.

And one rule about physics: hair always starts from the root and falls downward. When a reference is messy and you can't tell where a strand goes, find where it originates and follow it from there. Tied-back hair pulls from the hairline toward the tie, so your lines must travel that way even if the photo doesn't show them clearly.

Step 3: Second Draft, Direction and Layers

On a new layer, switch to the Peppermint brush in black and lower Draft 1's opacity. Now you refine each chunk into layers of hair: where a section overlaps another, where a lock twists into an S-curve, where the braid weaves over and under.

Freya's advice on line quality here shapes everything later: draw complete lines. Start where the lock starts and finish where it ends, instead of stroking short dashes that stop in the middle. If you don't know where a line ends, that's the problem to solve now, not during inking.

She's also honest about restraint. There are far more lines in a real photo than you should draw. Hold back, because every line you draft becomes ink weight later, and overdrawn hair looks heavy and messy instead of soft.

Step 4: Inking, Where the Softness Happens

Add an Inking layer, reduce the draft's opacity, and pick up the Freya Inking Pen Sharp brush. This is the stage Freya's "secret" actually lives in, and it's three small habits.

Touch and let go. Her strokes land gently and lift off at the ends, so every line tapers to a sharp point. She demonstrates the wrong way in the lesson, pressing hard to the end of the stroke, and rejects it immediately: trace, let go, touch, let go. That taper is what keeps straight hair from looking rigid.

Gaps are light, density is shadow. The spacing between your fine lines does the shading. Where the hair catches light, leave bigger gaps between strokes. Where a layer overlaps another or turns away, draw the lines closer together and it darkens on its own. The gaps don't need to be even, and shouldn't be.

Draw over, then erase. For the flyaway strands that cross other locks, Freya picks one line, extends it right across the neighboring hair, then erases the underlying lines with the eraser set to the same Inking Pen Sharp brush. The strand looks like it genuinely passes over the hair behind it. She adds these one at a time at the end, and calls out the effect: it makes the drawing look complex, the kind people ask how you did.

Practical hand advice from the same chapter: rest your outer hand lightly on the screen as a grip, draw long lines with your whole hand moving rather than fingers alone, and zoom in when a line matters. Zoomed-out inking is faster but the line ends get sloppy.

Men's Hair Is a Different Problem

Freya admits openly in the men's hair chapter that she finds it harder than women's hair, because the logic changes with the length.

Long men's hair works exactly like women's. Short hair doesn't: there are no long flowing lines to trace, so she builds it from many short strokes drawn in the direction the hair grows, varied so no patch repeats the same pattern. The rule she repeats is that line length equals hair length. Draw long strokes on a short fade and you've given him a different haircut. The same rule covers beards: short lines for a short goatee, or you change the style.

Where a cut fades out, she stops drawing lines and lets the later coloring stage carry the gradient. And when the reference is unreadable, her fallback is imagination grounded in observation: picture the person standing in front of you and ask which way that hair would actually fall.

Be Patient With It

Freya warns at the end of the drafting chapter that the inking work ahead is genuinely demanding: get enough sleep and eat first, otherwise you will be annoyed. She's teasing, but she's also telling you the truth about hair. The method is simple; the patience is the skill.

These three chapters sit in the middle of Portrait Academy, after the line-control exercises that train the tapered stroke and before the coloring that turns the inked hair soft. If your lines came out shaky here, the course starts further back, with the drills that fix exactly that, and works up to the full portrait one feature at a time 💛