I needed some hair for a render I’m working on and thought someone might appreciate a tutorial on how to make hair with The GIMP.  This will work for any hair you’re trying to make, including textures for Second Life.

You’ll want to fill with which ever base color you want your hair to be, in this I’m using black.  Then you add some lines in a lighter color with a medium brush, and some in a slightly lighter color with a medium small brush:

It doesn’t have to be perfect, but do keep in mind how you want your lighter tones to show on your hair.  The trick to making hair is in the noise and blur filters, and you’ll use both of them to get your hair exactly the way you want it.  Here I have used the RGB Noise filter set to 0.8:

Next put some Noise Spread into it, and use the preview option so you can see how much you want.  I used full size for my image which is 512 x 512:

Doesn’t look much like hair yet does it?  We need blur to make it right.  Here I’ve added Motion Blur at angle 90 and length 28:

And now you have hair!  You can go back and add a bit of noise or blur as you need, to get it how you want it.  You can also add shine on another layer with a white brush and a bit of noise and blur, then set the layer to overlay.

Finished and quick rendered (yeah, the lighting sucks):