Step Six: Doin' That Wild Pink 'Do

The main problems with the original hair were that it looked too still and regular, was the wrong color, the highlights were unclear and it was very different from the way the character looked in the reference material.
While I was doing the retouch I was thinking that the original sort of looked like she had a grape Jell-O mold on her head. (Sorry, Terrance!) This gave me a cool idea for a robot illustration but I haven't done it yet.
Rather than try and modify the original hair I made a new layer, hair,  and sketched in the rough shape of the hair the way I thought it might look. She would probably be moving a bit backwards with the pose I had envisioned her in so I made her hair react accordingly. I used Photoshop's pencil tool to do the base sketch and filled the areas with a color that I averaged by eye from the various reference images, darkened it up using the HSB sliders and used that as the shadow color.
I prefer to use the HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brilliance) sliders when working with a computer because they're a lot easier to control than the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) or CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, (Kuro) Black)  sliders. I know if I want the color darkened a bit but does it need more red or green? If I can't use a color wheel I'll take the HSB sliders.
Once I had the base colors in I put in the highlights. Normally I would do them on a separate layer and multiply them in but I used just a simple white highlight that I put in with a brush and it fit better.
I made another layer, sampled the darker color in the hair and used the HSB sliders to darken the color up again then sketched in some thin lines for extra hair. This enhances the softness of the hair and gives the character a more feminine look.
As a separate layer under the hair layer I made eyebrows. I erased the eyebrows off the original and painted them in, again working from the reference material. I pushed the left brow up a bit to give her a little more life in her expression but it didn't come out as well as I would have liked and makes her head look kind of off balance. Oh well.
Common mistake in amateur anime art is leaving off the eyebrows or just putting them in quickly withouth consideration. The eyebrows are the most expressive feature on the face. The eyes can convey emotion but without eyebrows that emotion will be diluted. In a way, the eyebrows are like the punctuation marks of facial expression.
Using the same set of eyes, we can see the difference the seemingly simple lines of the eyebrows make:

			What emotion is this?

In retrospect I made the hair too high on the head but it looks kind of like she just jumped up and is on her way down or the wind is blowing or something so it isn't too bad.