Practice to the sidetail hair of Anemachi
This is the note for my practice to an illustration as a beginner.
Today's illustration
The next left illustration is the one before I practiced and right one is after I did to draw Anemachi, who is a sister of VTuber Suisei Hoshimachi.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
 |  |
In this time, I practiced how to draw a sidetail hair. I couldn't find very good books or videos for drawing it unfortunatelly, so I just reviewed my illustration, considered how to improve, and practiced.
These are steps I practiced:
- Reviewed my original illustration by myself
- Picked up a few things for improvements
- Practiced and figured out a few things I thought I can improve
- Redrew my illustration and checked what was improved
Reviewed my original illustration
What can be better
- Shade and shadows of sidetail hairs can be better
- Neck might be too long
- Wider left shoulder might be better.
- Lower eyebrows might be better
- Her eye ring can be more bright
- Sidetail hairs can be less sharp and softer
- The shapes of star hair pins are too sharp
- Hair highlight can be more bright
- Body part between breast and arm can be drawn more natural
- Collars can show less flat
- The place to tie for a sidetail hair can be draw better
- The angle of body and face can be more natural?
What was drawn well
- It looks not very strange overall to me, though there are tons of things that can be improved
Practice and lessons
I decided to practice how to draw a sidetail hair.
I couldn't find good books nor videos to draw a sidetail hair better, and also noticed it's the challenge for me to draw it because it's not tied by a simple way, and I didn't understand how to draw it of hers.
So, first of all, I checked illustrations of other people, listed on here, and see how they drew And noticed it seemed it's the bun hair with a sidetail, but I didn't draw the bun at all, so practiced drawing it.
Besides that, I practiced and checked whether it's gonna improve something. These illustrations are those when I practiced:
As you might noticed, I modified step by step and see it was good or not. Then overall modifications made it better, so I decided to redraw my original illustration.
What I redrew and what was improved
After practice, I redrew it, which I showed on the top of this post.
After redrawing, I thought the reason why the sidetail hair wasn't look good were:
- There are a large area in this illustration, but it was too simple compared to others
- Towards edges of it, the shape looked too sharp and not unnatural flow from the root of it.
Wrap up
I uploaded these illustrations on my SNS accounts.
One tip: this is the 1st time for me to use a layer mask, which can be used to hide a part of a layer. The clip studio paint account on a twitter said and explained about it on this link. I often delete the lines on the line layers to clean up but I wanted to save those line information in order to recover it, and a layer mask can be used for this purpose. But it requires modifying layer mask as well all the time, so I'll see how much it's useful and worth using it.