Drawing Cartoon Hair

Sharing an interesting paper on drawing cartoon hair. The authors are discussing an animation software system, but the techniques are applicable to free hand drawing and coloring. The paper is a bit scholarly, but worth the read.

"Non-Photorealistic Rendering of Hair for Animated Cartoons"

Abstract
In cartoon drawings, hair is a strong vehicle of personality,emotions and style. In this paper, we present a powerful procedure to imitate the appearance of cartoon-like hair with a small set of parameters. Our approach is inspired by an inking technique called feathering, which consists of drawing hatches along the hair orientation while emphasizing the highlights with ink stains. Our system provides a set of tools to facilitate the positioning of the generated hair over the hand-drawn hair while keeping an intuitive interface for the artists. We can also achieve hair animation by interpolating various keyframes set by the user. Our approach has proven successful and flexible enough to adapt itself to different styles and is particularly well-suited for traditional animators.