I'm bad at explaining, so don't expect much from me here.

Force fade is important because it changes how your brush lays. It may not seem like much by just looking at it, but trust me, it makes a huge difference in how your hair looks. It'll be much more pretty and flowing if you use force fade.
(left is regular, right is force fade. Disregard pixelation, the canvas size fucked up quality.)

When doing hair, never use a straight line. Sometimes you need to get close to straight, but strokes always need some sort of curve to em. Below are a few examples of different strokes to use.

For most pieces, I keep this brush on 2.8 for outlining. Sometimes you need to make it a little bigger or smaller, but usually 2.8 is perfect.
Unfortunately I have no tips for outlining. I basically just flick my hand around until there's something semi-decent on my canvas, and it's not uncommon to hit the delete button and try again. Hopefully you have better luck at that than I do.

As you can see in the above image, I didn't use the same strokes for the neck. For pieces where the long parts of the hair are on the opposite side of the horse from the viewer, you'll need to do this different squiggle on the neck. To do this, I take a hard dip pen, still on force fade, and run it all across the top of the neck, waving gently. The force fade will do the rest of the work.

You can also see that I did the outlines in red. I do this for all of my pieces because it helps distinguish the hair you're lining from the background/horse. Seeing where you're going makes the end product much nicer.

Now to fill in the outline. Use a new layer just in case it doesn't go well. For this step, I turn off my force fade and grab the pen brush. You'll find it just a little below the dip pens in the brush menu. If you have the free version of ibis (which I do), you'll have to watch an ad to use it.


This brush can be any size, but keep it on %40 opacity. You'll have to go over spots a few times, but it'll help the edges stay nice and defined (you leave it with less fill on the edges). On the left of this image, this is the %40 pen on one stroke, and on the right, the %40 pen on multiple strokes.

Fill it in.

You now have your base. Congrats!

Well, children, there's a lovely filter for changing to solid color.




Toy around with the color in there until you have a decent enough base color. Remember to keep your base darker than what you want the end result to be.
When the color has changed, you may notice some holes in your fill. Go back and fill those in with the new color (you can use the eye dropper to select it).



Now on a different layer from your hair, make a color palette. This will consist of your base color and about four other shades. The first new shade will be a bit lighter than your base and tinted to a similar color as the background. The next will be a more "normal" grey. Then a light grey, then white.

Now we're ready to start drawing strands.
Make a new layer. Select the darkest shade from your color palette (not the base color) and use your 2.8 soft dip pen on force fade to draw the shapes of the hair. Some flicks will be short, others will go all the way from top to bottom. Just mess around until you've got something decent. Once you're done with that, lower the opacity of the layer to look something like this.

Example of the change-- top is before opacity change, bottom is after.

Now make another new layer. Lower your brush size to 2.5 (always move .3 down per color change). Grab the next color in line in your palette and go over the same areas of the hair again. Once done, lower opacity to something like this.

Keep going in this pattern. The lighter the color, the smaller the brush (once again, -.3 difference), and every new color must be on a new layer so that you can lower its opacity later. After opacity is toyed with, the layers can me merged.

After all that, add some shadows using the base color on a 1.9 brush. The end result should be something like this.

Disable force fade. Use a black airbrush on a lower layer to add the hair's shadow on the body where needed. Gaussian blur x however it looks best. Then use the Pen brush on different clipping layers (attached to the hair) to make the hair fit with the horse/background and match the lighting. This is the fun part, and where it all starts to come together! Use different layer settings and colors to make it pop, and lower opacities when needed. For this piece, I used many different background colors on multiply, soft light, hard light, color dodge, and screen. I also used the filters "mono color" and "brightness and contrast" to change the colors of the hair to match the horse. Here was the end result.