COMICS RIFFS I LOVE: BOICHI's approach to depicting dark hair

I've spoken before on Comics Riffs I Love of my adoration for the artist BOICHI's work on the manga Sun-Ken Rock. In fact, I'll copy/paste a few introductory paragraphs from my previous BOICHI Admiration Post: 

The Korean artist BOICHI is probably best-known nowadays for his work on the manga Dr. Stone, but I first enjoyed his work on the crime/action series Sun-Ken Rock, serialized in full on the Crunchyroll Manga iOS app. An over-the-top gangster narrative featuring Japanese fish-out-of-water Kitano Ken battling his way to the top of the Korean crime scene, Sun-Ken Rock isn't a manga I can quite give an unqualified recommendation, as it's often goofy and gamy as hell—sometimes both at the same time, as with the jawdroppingly inexplicable "Korean BBQ sauce bukkake" scene.

But the series does some things incredibly well, as it features thrillingly kinetic fight scenes, beautiful use of high-contrast B&W chiaroscuro, amazing spectacle, and some of the most adept and smoothly "comic-integrated" uses of photoreference I've ever seen. (More on that in a future post.)

This time around, I'd like to focus on a different aspect of BOICHI's work on Sun-Ken Rock: Namely, his detailed and intricate—and, I believe, photoreference-informed—approach to rendering dark hair.

See how he draws the same basic locks of hair that most artists depict, but then works in a series of finer, even single strands of hair around those, uh, "primary clumps"?

The approach is, I assume, relatively slow and time-consuming, but dang if the results aren't gorgeous.

Note also that, much like BOICHI's elegantly simplified approach to depicting menswear, he generally leaves the characters' hair overall as a solid black mass, but then goes to town with the "delicate stranding" around the outline of each mane, as opposed to spending great amounts of time rendering highlights in the hair, which is what most artists do (including myself).

Sun-Ken Rock is heavily photoreferenced, and my theory is that this hair-rendering technique is likely derived from such ref.  If so, that's an ideal use of the ol' photoref, IMHO. See, I'm not interested in photoreference or life drawing just for the sake of "realism"—whatever that might mean—but I am very much interested in trying to break out of the same ol' artistic ruts and comfortable but repetitive stylistic habits, and photoref is one way to work towards that lofty goal.

My own, less detailed take on BOICHI-inspired hair rendering appeared in Empowered vol.11. In some of the early shots of Mindf**k's brother (whose face we never see, as he quite possibly didn't have any facial features remaining), his windblown hair looked kinda, well, frazzled:

But later on in the volume, I tried an approach with more flowing, wavy, BOICHI-ish "substranding" of hair:

TBH, as I was struggling and flailing my way though the grinding, Sisyphean nightmare of drawing Empowered vol.11, I just didn't have the patience to attempt the incredibly detailed "substranding" BOICHI used. In the future, though, I might take a stab at more detailed hair rendering along these lines.

Holy crap, this post just took a g-d hour and a half outta my all-important morning shift.  Yikes! Writing the g-d commentary took up most of that time, gotta admit; next time around on Comics Riffs I Love, I might have to post a bunch of inspiring art and then just tack on a brief comment like, "Hey, isn't this neat, folks? Enjoy!"  

Next Monday on this here Patreon: Time for another double dose of life drawings, as usual.