Notes on drawing curls, horns, springs, and spirals

Now, this is less of a step by step than a "here's some ways to think about things with some useful tidbits thrown in." Though I will be adding a section with a useful efficiency improving digital art process for drawing curls faster down at the bottom (that isn't using assets to do it for you).

So, first things first, the best way to think about curls is... empty paper towel tubes. Which makes perfect sense if you've ever seen someone use a curling iron.

Essentially, when you look at curls you are seeing both front and the backside of a hollow spiral. As if someone had unraveled a paper towel tube and stretched it. If you can draw a paper towel tube you can draw a curl.

When curls are seen head on you'll notice a lot of these elongated S shapes - the same ones you'll see on the tube I posted above. Hair tends to have more rounded edges than paper does, but tube curls tend to be pretty flat. Horns are more rounded still, especially when they resemble twisted rebar.

Since this is now basically a material (here paper, but it could be hair, ribbon, horn, whatever) wrapped around a tube that doesn't exist, you also see the backside. Which is also an S shape if you were to see it exposed.

In fact its a nearly identical S shape, so lets just... cut copy paste. Now this is admittedly a dumb way to do this. I just wanted to get you in the headspace of "as above, so below."

It's easy enough to draw them once you get the hang of. At least in their simplified form.

Of course things will get stranger as the curl fluffs out, or gets broken up, or blows in the wind and swirls around. Which is why when I'm just doodling I usually just make a bunch of messed up wavy lines.

As an aside... even though it was just what I had, honestly using wires like that turned out to be a great demonstration. Both ends are tied off so the lines take on the form of outlines. I wrapped them around a paintbrush handle. I would highly recommend it if you want to make some cool references.

Some of you might note, however, that the tube I originally posted at the beginning as an example of "tube" doesn't, in face, make those delightful S shapes. Because it's at an angle. Which is true. So let's get into springs.

You see, after you tilt the tube enough, those S shapes start collapsing and overlapping. Instead of getting pulled out spirals, you get wound up telephone cord. You guys aren't too young for that, right? It looks like this.

Those S shapes become tilted and weighted C shapes when seen from above or below.

So what you are looking at with that original tube is actually something like this.

It looks a bit like a series of parallel cross sections cut out of a cucumber. Or banana. Or some other tube like object.

Like this. The hair wrapped around a curling iron all over again. And, just as in the prior example, the backside makes a reversed motion - it takes the opposed angle, going the other direction, similar to a V shape. It's unfortunately one of those shapes that never looks right even when correct.

Which brings me to the end, wherein I promised everyone a neat hack to make your life a little easier. Now, I drew these very badly, but I also did them incredibly fast, like in a matter of seconds fast. I could make them much neater but that's not the point of the demo.

I used CSP, which is what I will walk you through, but I know for a fact you can also do it in Krita since I made sure of it before I started writing. You can also do it in Photoshop but Adobe can blow me 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️ Use a brush with tapered ends, such as For effect line. Draw some S shapes in white.

Go to layer properties. Apply a border effect. Make it black. You can change it later (same with the white) but for right now, make it black. For other programs this will be called stroke.

New layer under the first. More S shapes. Border effect.

You can clean up your lines by, on either layer, adding or removing white. Merge with layer below when you are satisfied with them. I am certainly not but I don't want to spend all day on this.

Now for the magic trick. Edit > Convert brightness to opacity. If you are using another program I advise drawing in bright red then color selecting the red and deleting it out. Or you can set the lines to their own layer and use multiply, which leaves them editable, but has other issues.

New layer. Set your line layer as a reference layer. Select a color, then use your magic ice cream cone fill tool (assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail...) and lasso that puppy.

Done.

As always, I do this stuff completely for free because I value community knowledge. But I am also very poor. So if this helped you please consider tossing a few dollars my way at the Kofi link below.

It took me actual literal hours to assemble it all.

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