[orOme]

Hum.....i think to draw hair like that bullock picture first you must put together a good palette, and do as little shading as possible with dodge/burn, mainly because hair like this which doesnt look flashy needs almost perfect colorwork to make it look good. I'd drop the smudging as well,and do the hair as manually as possible with airbrush using the lighten/darken/multiply setting. Start with big brushes, and go more and more into detail(the inevitable rule).

The way i often work(might not be the correct one. I'm open for suggestions)is to draw in the largest hairlocks, to get a sense of how the hair flows/curls, and from there i draw in smaller hairlocks, and go more into detail from there.

check: http://www.gfxzone.org/personal/orome/01/orome-night_flight.html

Abit old image, but I applied the teknique there.

[arioch]

I agree with OrOme. That is basically how I do my hair as well. I did find a bit further success in one of my drawings by modifying the process a little bit as follows.

After I had a large portion of the hair base laid down I created a new layer. In this layer I used the shadow or darker color of the hair with the airbrush. I sprayed the airbrush (one solid color)into the areas where I wanted the shadows to be. Now this is what is a little bit different. I used Layer-Add Layer Mask- Hide All. This makes the layer of color disappear but if you use the brush or airbrush with the color white you will bring back the color as you draw across the layer. This allowed me to keep the brush strokes confined to a certain area where I wanted the shadows to be. That way I didnt have to worry about overshooting into an area I didnt want the shadow color to be in. I just laid down the color I wanted, made it disappear, and then proceeded with the brush strokes in the direction I wanted.

After I was all done with the hair (this is something that works very well for other things like the edge of skin for highlights) I decided I wanted to bring out the edges of the hair a bit. By using a layer ontop of the hair and choosing Layer-Group with Previous my coloring was confined to the exact shape of the hair pattern. So I could take the airbrush and darken the tips of the hair if I wanted too without having to worry about going back over it and cleaning it up to bring back the outline of the hair. You can see an example of the final output of this at http://members.home.net/arioch/pm.htm

Hope that makes sense......

[random]

here's a one hairtutorial what I did for Coaxcable when he asked help with hair..
http://www.kolumbus.fi/random/cxc3.jpg

[Goliath]

go to this site it shows how to do hair in photoshop in details!!
http://www.earthcurves.com/art/hair.htm

good luck!