Advice for a Newbie: Drawing/Shading Multicolored Hair

[Wendyy]

Hello! I'm an experienced writer with very little experience in art. I have a story I really wish to share and am trying my best to illustrate it. I have developed games and been writing for 5+ years but art is very new to me. I usually commission art for my games or other work, but as of right now I'm not in a spot(financially) to commission lots of pages, and I know finding an artist to work with unpaid is very unlikely. I am getting alright at lineart and backgrounds, but shading is just... a bit advanced for me. I am hoping that with lots of practice I can learn and improve but I need some help.

I have a character that has multicolored hair, similar to this image, and I'm unsure how to shade it in black and white.

Their hair in the back is a lighter color than the "front" or top. With some research, it seems that normally the back is shaded a darker color, due to things like it getting less light, so I am afraid it might look strange to make the undertones lighter. The main female in Kakegurui is depicted with slightly lighter hair in the back so it seems I might take notes from that, but other than that I haven't personally seen anything like this done before, so any examples or insight would be great!

I also am unsure how/where to add shading. I am aiming to do simple gradients, but I'm not sure where to add black for shading. I have an example below, like where the bangs meet the face on the left. I suppose specifically I'm asking how to determine where the black shading is needed to separate the hair and give it more depth?

If for whatever reason, someone would be interested in helping me with only the shading/screentone aspect of my comic, let me know!

Please and thank you for taking the time to read. Any help is really appreciated, I'm going to continue to work hard and learn! This is my first time commenting here(at least for a while that I can remember) so if I've broken any rules just let me know and I will try to fix!

Edit: For context, my comic is manga style, monotone greyscale.

[SagaHolmgaard]

I think a good place to look for reference for multicolored hair in grayscale is Yugioh

I haven't ready it myself but I'm fairly sure there are multiple characters with mult-colored hair. Maybe you'll even find one with the same kind of hair colors as your character!

Here are some doodles I made to try out what you're describing:

In option 1 the lighter hair around the neck looks lighter because there's a shadow separating it from the rest of the hair, but it's actually the same shade of gray! As you can see by the color dropper to the right.

In option 2 the hair is black, which in my opinion allows for more leeway to make more design-y decisons that don't have to be super realistic, so the hair underneath can be lighter and have more contrast, it still looks good imo.

The last drawing is just showing that there might be times in your comic where there might be light hitting that part of the hair, for example if their hair is done up or if there's a strong gust of wind. Then you can take the chance to shade it in a way that gives it form.

Also, my most recent comic had a character with two toned hair. Not in the way you want, but it might help anyway to see how I went about it. Most of the time I didn't bother with too much shading because of time limits and I think it still looks fine hehe:

Good luck with your comic!!

[Wendyy]

You're so sweet, you didn't have to do little doodles for me! T-T Thank you so much!! I'll have a good look at how Yugioh does it. I also think something like your doodle in #2 is what I'll lean towards.
Again thanks! Good luck yourself!