Drawing hairs

Posted on December 29, 2007 Updated on July 7, 2009

This tutorial shows the possibility of creating complex structures such as hair with Inkscape.

Part 1: The hair pattern prepare
We open an empty standard document and draw a horizontal 700 px line with the Bezier-courve by pressing ctr.

The line must be converted now into curves .

After that add more nodes with effects>modify path>add nodes those max. Segment length on 5,0.

Now the effects>modify path>jitter nodes. It has ca. 280 nodes and looks now something like barbwire.

Next we will pushing in the “barbwire” down to 10 pixels broad. Next vertical stretch up to 150 pixels.

You can see what it should be. We call it “basicpattern”.

We add nodes again like above. The Pattern has now 2484 nodes. So to produce wavy hanks is there a possibility:
Pattern along path! We draw a light bow and easy S-curve.
Mark the basicpattern and path and do effect>generate from path>pattern along path.The settings for the Pattern:

1. Basicpattern
2. At the bow / single stretched / sample is vertical
3. At the bow / single / sample is horizontal
4. At the S-curve / single stretched / sample is vertical

It is important that you simplify after (Strg + L ) to get a CPU-friendly number of knots.

Now we should know what kind of hairstyle we want. First, we draw the black outline-shape and cut the lower bound with a basicpattern. Then we search the rigth pattern, filled it with grey and build the complete style over the shape. It is a little bit like a puzzle.
When you`re finish double the outline shape mark all objekts and do Objekt > clip > set

That`s it!

The final result:

This work is under Creative Commons-Licence .

See also other translations from other Inkscape Users (Thanx for respecting my work!):