Thread:Avnore/@comment-27924856-20160804185455/@comment-27924856-20160806021842

TsunIsBack wrote: Wow you're good at portrait making!

how do you make their hairstyles? It's kind of like tracing, I suppose. I usually start by taking the reference image (with the character looking directly forward and everything) and seperating the hair from everything else, pasting it onto whatever portrait base I'm using, resizing and distorting it until it looks right, and putting it as the top layer so that it can serve as a good outline. Then I make it just faint enough so I can see the seperate strands of hair, but leave it visible enough for me to see.

And then I pick a good "base" hairpiece from a canon student's portrait (eg: Kokona's bangs) or from that one idol game I played a lot, seperate it from the rest of the hair like I did with the reference, and erase any residue from surrounding parts.

After that it's really just a lot of Paste > Scale/Rotate/Free Deform > Blur Tool. It's also important to look at how the character's hair is layered rather than just the outline, otherwise the portrait will end up looking rather two-dimensional. Here's an example of how I usually layer things, by the way. I'll probably make a full tutorial when I have free time.