Sticky avatars - How do I hair?

[Turgon9357]

I have been making stickies for a while now and never figured out how to make good-looking hair. Has anyone found an effective method?

[Savannah]

Nope -- hair is and has always been the hardest part for me. The only trick I've found to help is to draw it freehand before making a path in Inkscape, as that seems to make it flow better. And practice. Always practice...

[John Cribati]

Hair is only as easy or difficult as you are willing to make it. Complicated hairstyles generally take longer than simple ones, but as being lazy finding viable workarounds is an integral part of my interpretation of the style, I can give you a few tips.

These are 8 heads that I recently drew up. They're for a comic, so the hairstyles are purposely simple.

http://i1210.photobucket.com/albums/cc411/Herpestidae/Heads_zpse8e75b89.png

You'll notice that 1 and 4 have basically the same hair. That's because men will generally have defined, straight hairlines. It'll be a poorly-defined hairline if he hasn't been to the barber in a few weeks, but you could still tell that it's somewhere in there. Women generally have curved or nonexistent hairlines.

Most of these are self-explanatory, so let's focus on 2, 7, and 8.

2 is definitely the most complicated, but even then, it's more because of the "braids" than anything else. Basically, the ponytail is made up of 3 parts: An orange curve/line with a thick stroke and a black curve/line with a thicker stroke, and the braid lines.
For the braid lines, I duplicated the orange stroke, Made a node path around it (http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/images/ICONS_PNG/actions/stroke-to-path.png), changed the stroke width and color, then highlighted the nodes and used the http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/images/ICONS_PNG/actions/node-add.png tool to make more nodes along the path. Then I broke up the thing into smaller paths (http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/images/ICONS_PNG/actions/node-break.png) and connected them differently. Then I drew a few more paths from the hairline to the back of the head.

As for 7 and 8, 3-node paths are your friend. Your best friend. You can seriously make any hairstyle by starting out with a bunch of 3-node paths. Make them different sizes, change the angles of curvature, rotate them, and layer them. That's literally it.