Ended up switching programs in the middle of making this.

Decided to throw together this tutorial to help anyone with mane & tail work on manips.

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There's several different ways to do mane and tail work, but today I'm going to talk about the smuding method.

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I am going to talk about how to smudge out hair and make it look as natural as possible. Using the existing mane and tail, instead of erasing and redrawing it.

I am only going to show mane work, but everything will apply to tail work also.

I will be using Affinity Photo for this, but this method should work for most programs. Only big difference is brush settings, but you can just find what works for you.

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1. Brush settings

2. Smuding out the mane

3. Highlights

4. Shadows

5. Finishing touches

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Once your horse is all cut out and placed in the background you can start mane and tail work. The first step to doing so is brush settings. These are very important!

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I start by selecting the smudge tool in my program, then I edit the settings to suit my needs.

I start with a basic soft brush set at 80-100% opacity.

I keep all other basic presets the same, a few other things I change are rate and flow. Typically I keep my rate at 60-80% and higher.

Rate is the strength of the smuding, and how far the colors will be pulled out. Rate really depends on how long of a hair strand you would like. Flow is the amount of brush color to blend. The higher your flow is the more your chosen color will be added into your smuding. You will only want to incread flow if you have little to no existing mane to work with.

Here is a screenshot of my brush settings for those of you that are visual learners.

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Now that you have your settings all figured out it's time to move on to step 2.

You want to try and replicate the original mane as much as possible, it helps to have the un cut horse image open.

Take your smudge brush and start dragging out strands of hair. Never use too large of a brush. I use around 1-10px depending on how large the art is. I start with tossing in thicker strands then smaller ones. You will want to use a good variation of brush sizes to get the most natural look. Sometimes you will need to go over one strand several times to get it dark enough. Another thing is to never make perfectly straight strands, it looks unnatural. Once you have your mane nice and filled in, go in and add fly aways using a 1-2px brush. Sometimes you will also need to smudge the hair that wasn't cut out. Just to give it a more seamless look and blend it with the smudged out strands.

(photo here)

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Next what I like to do is take an almost white color and a 1px hard brush to add in highlights. This will give your mane that extra little push so it doesn't look flat. Draw in white lines where you think they should be and plenty of them. The next step is to use your smudge tool on pretty low settings. And lightly smudge out the white lines but not too much. You will want to pay extra attention to the start and ends of the lines. Try to blend them so they don't come to a hard stop. After that is finished set the layer to soft light and lower the opacity to your liking. That's about it for highlights.

(settings photo here)

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This step is very similar to step 3, just in black. Just follow the same steps but use a black or almost black color. And place these lines in between the white lines.

(photo here)

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