wavy hair tutorial

So you want to have long, thick, luxuriant curly hair with minimal upkeep? Well, I can't help you there. But I can help you with the next best thing: making long, thick, luxuriant, curly hair for your dolls with a minimum of effort! In this tutorial we are actually going to use a palette, shock. We are also going to use Paint Shop Pro 7, although this technique also works in version 6 and presumably 8 and 9.

1. Open up the doll you want to add hair to.

2. Create a new layer (Layers > New Raster Layer). Name it "hair" or something if you want to be sure you don't lose track of what you're doing.

3. Select the darkest color of your palette, and draw in the hair outline with your paintbrush set to 1 pixel. Make long messy strands. Don't worry about cleaning up your lines, just get a shape you like.

4. Select the next darkest color, and fill in all the gaps. Once you have closed all those sneaky holes in the outline, you can flood fill the bigger areas to save time.

5. Select the Magic Wand tool. Set the Match Mode to "RGB Value", the "Feather" and the Tolerance to "0". Select one of the lighter brown areas, then go to Selections > Modify > Select Similar. This will select all the lighter brown bits at once.

6. Now comes the clever part. Select the Mover tool. Right-click on the selection you just made, and carefully drag it up and over by one pixel.

7. Adjust your colors so that the second-darkest color is the background color, and the color lighter than that is the foreground color. Select the Color Replacer tool and double click. You just added a highlight to your hair without hardly trying :)

8. Move the selection by another pixel in the same direction, and repeat with the next lightest color. Continue until you run out of colors or out of hair ;)

9. If you think the hair needs a little extra shine at this point you can use the darken and lighten brushes to add shadows and highlights, but it shouldn't be strictly necessary.