How to Embroider Hair in Less Than 4 min (TUTORIAL)

Learn to use the nuance stitch and different tricks and techniques to create hair for embroidery portraits with Bugambilo

Hair is something so fine, with so many shades, colours, shapes, and movements that it can be difficult to embroider it realistically.

In this tutorial, Bugambilo goes over a series of techniques and tips for drawing hair with thread. So prepare your mouliné thread and needle and let's go.

1. Avoid regularity

For a realistic embroidery portrait, try not to focus on the regularity of your stitches, or how tidy your threads are. This is why we choose the nuance stitch while avoiding the regularity that characterizes it. This way, the hair we draw will look more natural and organic.

2. Work with degradé

We can embroider hair realistically with the degradé technique. However, there's no need to limit ourselves to applying it to color alone. We can also play with density to create a similar effect: darker areas will have more thread and lighter areas less.

For example, to add hair to the temple of our portrait, we will establish a point of greater density and reduce it as the thread approaches the ear.

3. Add different color tones

As we embroider the hair of our portrait, we will leave space between the threads to add more colors later.

To save time changing threads, embroider all the thread we need of one color at the same time before changing to the next color and repeating the process.

4. Pay attention to hair length

Embroidering long hair is a different challenge to embroidering short hair. For long hair, we use the prisoner stitch. This creates a loose line with which we can mark the mark the path of our thread. We will leave a loose thread and then adjust it to exactly where we need it to stay using another thread and needle.

There you have the keys for creating realistic hair in your embroidery portraits. Now, go experiment with different hairs, styles and colors!

If you liked this tutorial, you can learn how to illustrate portraits combining embroidery techniques on her online Bugambilo's course Creation of Embroidered Portraits.

You may be interested in:

- Needle Painting for Beginners, a course by Valentina Castillo
- Creative Embroidery: The Stitch Revolution, a course by Trini Guzmán (holaleon)
- Miniature Embroidery Techniques, a course by Silvia Peligro