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Step 1

Prepare the base and lock it. Create a new layer for the hair. Choose the two base colours for your hair - here I've got black & grey.. The circled tools are the ones I used for this example: magic wand, pencil and the burn/dodge tool. Select the pencil tool (set the settings on 1 pixel size, 100% hardness & opacity) then set the colour to black and away we go...

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Step 2

Roughly draw an outline of your hair design. Forget the stray pixels for now, they can be cleaned up later.
Step 3

Here, I've added a the "back" of the hair. It's often easier to put this on a new layer and place it behind your base.

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Step 4

Fill in the outline with your second colour. Any stray pixels can be cleaned up, and like I usually do, you might want to adjust the design itself.
Step 5

Select the magic wand tool (anti-aliased should be turned off) and click on the filled in colour. Press CTRL+H to hide it if you like - I do because then it doesn't get in the way.

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Step 6

Now choose the burn tool, a small sized brush (1-2 pixels) & set it at 50% exposure. Start from the where you want the parting in the hair and begin shading down the hair.
Step 7

When you've done the front, do the back in the same way. If you want you can choose a larger brush and sweep over the whole area to make it darker in general to give a more realistic touch dimension-wise.

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Step 8

When you're happy with your hair strands, increase the burn exposure to between 90-100% and go over them again to define them further -paying particular attention to the top of the hair & parting.

Finally the highlights - pick the dodge tool, set at 85% exposure. These can be done in 2 ways: either by a single sweep of the a larger brush over the top of the hair and then repeated over with a smaller brush. Or shade like you did with the dark strands with a smaller brush, on the lighter sections of the hair.

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