Original topic deleted since I got my answer, so I thought I'd replace it with a hair tutorial - Hope someone finds this helpful.

My Hair Tutorial for GIMP 2.6…

Motto 1: Layers, layers everywhere!
Motto 2: Gaussian & 90 degree Motion Blur = your best friends

This tutorial is a little longish but can make for some really pretty hair textures! The fact that everything is in layers allows you a LOT of flexibility in how it turns out in the end so you can play with layer modes to get some very different looks.

1. Create new 256 x 256 image and fill it with your base color and add some vertical streaks from the same color family and then Gaussian blur it at about 40-60 px.

I am going for blond so I chose the colors below:



2. Add new layer and bucket fill it black, and then add noise – I use the settings below:



3. Motion blur @ 90 degree angle and about 21 – 30 pixels. Flip vertically and repeat motion blur.

4. Go to Colors/Curves and move the line somewhere around the settings below:
- Moving the top right dot to the left lightens the light to mid colors.
- Moving the bottom left dot to the right darkens the mid to dark colors.
- This step will allow you to create greater contrast and produce very lovely variances in your hair colors – at least it does for me.



You should now have something that looks somewhat like this – I named this layer Hair Grain:



5. Now, set the hair grain layer to grain merge at an opacity that pleases you – I used 60 percent opacity here. You get something like this – it’s a little crazy looking right now but it’ll get nicer with some tweaking:



6. From here on out the only color we will be using is a mid-tone gray – not too dark or too light. Add a new layer and make two thick grey lines – I just rectangle selected and bucket-filled them in and then applied Gaussian blur around 40 px. If you want to use a large blurry brush that’s ok too – whatever your preference! Set layer to Dodge. I set it at about 50 percent opacity, but go ahead and play with it to get something you like. (Note: if you want more than 2 shines, just make more gray lines & zigzags below - i frequently use 3 or 4 shines in my hairs Keep in mind you'll want to adjust how much you're blurring them - less blurring for more shines.)



7. Add a new layer and brush zig-zag lines across with a small blur brush – you’ll want some variation in your zigzags…



8. I like to motion blur it 90 degrees at about 13 px and flip the layer vertically a few times and repeat motion blur:



9. Set Layer to Dodge – I set it at 60 percent opacity:



Nice and shiny!

10. Next add another layer and bucket fill with gray. Set layer to “color” mode and play with the opacity until you get something you like. I set mine to 60 to 70 percent opacity:



If you’re happy with your results you can stop here. I wasn’t so I made some additional adjustments – that’s the beauty of using so many layers – everything is adjustable and very forgiving if you happen to make a mistake.

Anyhow, this looked just a hint too yellow/green to me on my monitor, so I adjusted the color layer using the hue/saturation and changed the hue toward red:



I decided I still wasn’t happy with how this looked on the mesh I was using, so to tweak the texture, I changed the hair grain layer to overlay mode at 100 percent opacity because I felt the grain merge was a little too harsh looking. I also decided to Gaussian blur the hair grain layer 2 pixels as well to soften it up a bit.

I added a little black at the very top and bottom on a new layer and Gaussian blurred it about 100 px (you might need less depending on your preference – I used a pretty thick black line though as I like a very gradual darkening toward the root and ends – I don’t like extreme roots or tips usually on hair) I set that layer to overlay at 90% opacity. I also went ahead and flipped the image horizontally to get the highlights placed better. Here is my final result:



Here it is in the client:

i love the natural look on that