Rock Effects!

by: oddhatter

Once again...this tutorial will assume that you're already familiar with Photoshop's tools. I'm starting off with a picture of an anthropormorphic Chiropteric Poogle(starlight_blunder). I've coloured everything else, but I left the hair for last(there's no relevance in that...sometimes I do it first...whatever, really).

First, I colour everything "hair" a solid colour. Because the original picture was scanned at 300 dpi and is HUGE, I made the picture completely line art(as a result, the picture at 100% has very rough jagged lines) and used the fill tool(no antil alias and tolerance at 0). I also made the line art a separate layer(though I'm colouring on it), and removed all the "white" so that everything uncoloured would be transparent.

Then I added the shadows using the airbrush tool. I used a small brush and set it to "multiply" at an opacity of around 10%. (The colour I'm using is the same as the base colour for the hair.)

Then, I added the highlights. My settings are the same as when I was adding shadows, except the tool is now set to "screen". I tried to keep some variation in each individual "section" of hair.

Now, I changed the airbrush's colour to white, and lowered the opacity even more(to 5% or so). It's still set to screen. I then emphasisised some of the highlights, making them significantly brighter. Then, using the smudge tool(set to a small brush and a pressure of about 50%), I "smudged" some of the hair, on order to make them look more like separate strands.

Then, going back to the airbrush, and changing to a smaller brush(it's still on white and "screen"), I went over and added "sparkles" to certain parts of the hair...

That's pretty much it! After I finished colouring though, I decided I didn't want her to have red hair. I changed the colour of her hair to blue using the "hue/saturation" option, found under image>adjust>hue/saturation (or ctrl+u). (and yeah, I changed the background too.)

And that's how I colour hair. I hope that the tutorial was helpful to you!

Samples of hair effects I've done using this method(or with slight variations...like more smudging)!