I like use brush strokes to use as a loose reference for how the hair should go. I pretend I'm looking at clouds and try to visualize the layers/flocks of hair and render out what I see. Irregardless it is much easier for me to work on a messy canvas than an empty pure white one.

Also I'm thinking that I'm gonna have to give this guy either a "- -" line eyes or a "0 0" super huge open eyes otherwise he'll look too punk-ish for my taste.

And on another note, GIMP just crashed on me. I lost half of the back of the head so I really don't want to keep working on it now >_>. I'm going to hit the sack and hopefully will regain interest in the morning.

Halfway done with the back again. Had to redo the brush strokes since GIMP crashed (Which is unfortunate, because I liked the previous brush strokes more). I have a before and after shot so you can try to see what I mean my rendering out the shapes that are there. I knew I wanted a messy back of the head, so that influenced how I made the flocks of hair. A lot of this info will probably be lost when I actually make the back of the head. Not quite sure what I want to do atm, but I'm leaning towards making the bottom part more complex and keeping the middle/top parts simple. Also considering adding ears.

Still need to go back and fix/polish the pieces but I'm pretty much done with the back for now. The purple strokes aren't really a part of the head, they're just to get a feel for how it'll look. Still don't know exactly what I want to do with the back for the final product, but I expect a lot of the info above to be lost. This part takes awhile to do since there's so many individual flocks to do (Hopefully tomorrow I'll be doing something less time consuming and be able to update more!). Also as if this wasn't already cluttered enough, GIMP doesn't have layer groups for paths for some reason.

So unfortunately I still had to actually sort out each piece for the back and that took awhile. Done with that for now though. Rendering out the hair like this serves two purposes. First I now have a clean view of the parts and can easily tell what needs to be fixed (Planning on changing the middle a lot, removing some pieces, making others get bigger, and getting rid of that weird vertical line I made by accident. Also gonna shrink some of the higher pieces and add a few more flocks there, might also make a few of them fancier). Second and more importantly, I can use the edge differences to create line-art via the edge filter (This is what I do for line-art since I can't draw). I made a small demo of how that line-art looks like with the top half.

Still, a lot of this info will be lost when I go into the final product. Also still considering ears, but probably won't do them at this rate.

Done with the back's line-art for now and also finished polishing the back.

I mashed the silhouette, the line-art, and the base paint I did earlier for the back of the head together with some filters for effect. Unfortunately, this is all just to make this preview look nice-ish. I don't plan on having this messiness in the final product (Though the feel should be somewhat similar, might stay with green as the final color). But, I do like the painterly look and will attempt to incorporate that later on (I'm not expecting that attempt to fail to be honest). The eyebrows and mouth are just placeholders for effect too.

Going to have to wake up early tomorrow so this is all I can do for today. Should have more time to work on this tomorrow though (Might spend some time working on Java instead though, dunno).

Also, sorry for the blocks of text and/or rambling. I like to explain myself and probably and going on for more than I need to since I've never shown WIPs before.

Got done with the eyes today (Might change them a bit later on but not much). Kinda working out of order to keep things interesting for ya'll (Eyes are fun to do!). Note that I'm not done with the eyebrows or lashes, just done with the eyes.

I sketch out the eyes loosely first as I do with almost anything. Makes it easy to check for mapping. I've said this before but when I make eyes I like to think I'm drawing a glass ball. The light goes though the eye and pools near the bottom, so the top should be relatively dark (In particular, I imagine the eye as a wrapped up glass ball such that there is only one way for light to come in). Added a lot of effects in the eye for the heck of it. Since I used two distinct shades for the iris I heavily limited my options for colors. If you're good at drawing you can go for a gradient/smoothed out approach and get some really colorful and interesting eyes that way. Not sure if I'm gonna keep the stars for highlights or not, but I've really been wanting to try stars as highlights for awhile. Also, for those who are curious the shading is done with HSV-shifting and with gradients.

Been busy lately so haven't made as much progress. I might stop working on this though, as I don't think I'll really learn anything new from finishing this. So there's not really much incentive for me to keep going on.

Also did some value corrections to the eyes. The line-art for the main-hair piece took longer than it should've since I went about doing it in a stupid way first and had to start over.

Decided to pick this up again.

Had to redo some parts of the back since I was lazy earlier. Halfway done with hard shadows on the back right now.

Got done with the back and did a few changes to the face. Also overlayed a color gradient over everything to kinda pull it together. Dunno if I'll keep the gradient overlay, but I'm probably gonna trash it in the end. Getting somewhat reluctant to change the mouth too. I feel like if I do anything larger with the mouth it'll make the eyes seem smaller by comparison, and I don't want that (Also wanna just finish this, probably the real reason I haven't done anything else with it tbh). Can't seem to get eyebrows to work, might be because I made the eyelashes so large.

Still need to color the hair and eyelashes. I think I'll be done with the head after that plus a few tweaks.