How to Color Hair in Procreate | Digital Coloring Tutorial by Kim White

Kim has also prepared an amazingly helpful (and free) resource for us! You can download this printable PDF of hair color combinations to help with your digital coloring, or to help with your other coloring! She’s also created the Procreate swatch files you can use with this tutorial.

Get the Procreate Swatch Files here.

And now, I’ll pass it over to Kim!

The page I’ll be working on today is by Sarah Renae Clark from her ‘Color Your Stress Away’ coloring book which you can find in her shop here. 

You don’t need this page to follow along as this simple technique can be applied easily to most coloring pages that have hair, although, this particular technique is better suited to straight or loose wavy hair.

This tutorial demonstrates an easy way to create a hair effect, but isn’t suitable for anyone that wants to create hyper-realistic hair. This is a beginner’s tutorial that helps you get to grip with some of the fun tools in Procreate!

Step Three: Set your line art as a reference layer and change the blend mode.

Tap on the layers panel and find the layer with your imported coloring page. Tap this layer to bring up your layer options, and then tap ‘Reference’ to set your line art as a reference layer. 

This will make it easier to do things such as color drop into the boundaries of the line art, whilst working on separate layers to the original line art layer. 

If you’re working with a coloring page that has a white background like my example has, on that same line art layer you’ll need to tap the ‘N’ to bring up the blend mode options and change it to ‘Multiply’. This means that any color you apply to layers beneath your line art will show up. Skip this step if you’re working with a transparent PNG image.

Step Four: Add a base colour on your hair strand.

Add a new layer beneath your line art, and using the darkest colour, drag and drop that into the section you want to fill. I’d suggest choosing a few strands of hair that seem to flow in the same direction.

Tap this same layer to bring up your layer options, and tap ‘Alpha Lock’.

Step Five: Apply the rest of the colors to your hair strand.

On the same layer, choose the next color – which is slightly lighter than the base color – and use the ‘Hard airbrush’ (tap the brush icon > Airbrushing > Hard Airbrush) to apply this color whilst following the directional flow of the hair. You’ll want this color to cover about 3/4 of the base color you applied in the previous step.

Repeat this process for all the other colors provided in the palettes provided, working from the darkest to the lightest color.

Step Six: Smudge the colors together.

Tap the smudge icon (the one that looks like a little pointed finger), then ‘Touchups’, and select the ‘Short Hair’ brush. 

Set your brush size to around 30% (this may change depending on your personal preference, it’s trial and error) and drag from the top to the bottom of your hair strand to smudge the colors together and create a subtle gradient. 

It doesn’t need to be a smooth blend, it actually works better if some of the texture remains intact.

Step Seven: Add a new layer for your lowlights.

Add a new layer above the layer you just worked on, but still beneath the line art. Set this layer as a clipping mask by tapping the layer, and selecting ‘Clipping Mask’.  Also, change the layer blend mode to ‘Multiply’.

Using the ‘Soft Airbrush’ (tap the brush icon > Airbrushing > Soft Airbrush) and the darkest / second darkest color from the palette provided, add some lowlights to the hair strand by softly painting darker regions by dragging from the top to the bottom of the hair strand. 

Remember to follow the directional flow of the hair.

Step Eight: Add a new layer for your highlights.

Add a new layer above the layer you just worked on, but still beneath the line art. Set this layer as a clipping mask by tapping the layer, and selecting ‘Clipping Mask’.  Also, change the layer blend mode to ‘Add’.

Using the ‘Soft Airbrush’ (tap the brush icon > Airbrushing > Soft Airbrush) and lightest color from the palette provided, add some highlights by painting lighter regions in the midsection of the hair strand. Remember to follow the directional flow of the hair, and consider where your light source is coming from.

This step is optional, but you can soften the appearance of these highlights by using the smudge tool and the ‘Short Hair’ brush (tap the brush icon > Touchups > Short Hair) to blend them out a little.

Step Ten: Group your layers.

This step isn’t really part of the technique, but more for helping to keep your layers panel less crazy! 

On the layers panel, select the layers you’ve been working on (base layer, highlight layers, lowlight layer) by swiping right. You’ll know they’ve been selected when they turn blue. 

Then tap ‘Group’ (in the top right of the layer panel) so that these all get added into a new section labeled ‘New group’. 

Tap the ‘New Group’ layer to bring up the group options, and then select ‘Flatten’. This will merge all of the layers you’ve worked on into one single layer, which will keep things tidier as you work through the process above for the rest of the hair.

Once flattened, it’s hard to work with these layers and edit them as all the effects and colors have been merged together, so please don’t group and flatten your layers until you’re happy with how things look.