Create Glossy Hair with Anime Glossing!

The Anime glossing method is perfect for adding a cute and distinctive sheen to any character’s hair.

It is a simple way to add sheen to your character’s hair using just a few extra colors.

Now, let’s break down what exactly is involved in the Anime glossing method.

Let’s use the Anime glossing method to add some depth to the hair in this image.

The layers are split up as shown below.

As you can see, there’s a layer just for the hair.

The Hair layer is where you have the base hair color.

Add Shadow 1 Layer

First, add another layer on top of the Hair layer for shadows.

Once you have the new layer, make sure to set the clipping mask function to ON.

Now that you have a shadow layer, set the Shadow layer’s blend mode to multiply.

Next, select the “pen (pressure)” from the brush window.

Now you can add shadows to the hair by using the same color as the Hair layer.

And just like that, the shadows are complete.

The shadows might be a bit dark for you at this point, so to fix this you can adjust the opacity of the layer in the layer window.

For this example, we have set the opacity to 60%.

Add Shadow 2 Layer

If we leave things here, we’ve already created an Anime-style effect, but let’s add another layer of darker shadows to take it from good to great.

Create a new Shadow 2 layer using the same steps as above.

Use the “pen (pressure)” brush to add more shadows to the hair.
Use the same color as the color on the “Hair” layer.

And there you have it, the second layer of shadows are complete.

The new shadows might be a bit dark again, so like before you can adjust the opacity of the layer.

We have set the opacity of the Shadow 2 layer to 50%.

The shadows are now complete.

Add Highlights

Finally, let’s add some highlights to the hair.

Just like before, create a new layer and set the clipping mask function to ON, but this time set the blend mode to “screen.”

Add a highlight that follows the shape of the head.

All done!

I hope you all had fun with this tutorial, and happy glossing!