This piece was inspired by an image by Loish. The vibrant emissive like inner hair with different outer hair color. Doing this in 3D was rather difficult because of the way 3D hairs are made. They don’t usually have material zones for both sides of the hair. I didn’t have a two-sided shader at the time, so had to make do. I ended up duplicating the hair and moving it inward as much as I could in order to only get the emission on the under layer of the hair. I turned the opacity up quite high (after unlocking limits) to get the thick strands and bright color for the inner hair. There was some postwork to smooth out the hair, but I think it turned out pretty good in the end!

Background was relatively basic with a flat-ish color and then brushwork on top with the bubbles.

Postwork: hair strands/smoothing, background, blurring, eye detailing, light enhancements, etc.