“What tools are good for drawing kinky hair in Illustrator?”
Here’s an Appearance stack that I whipped up in like ten minutes that’s a good start.
kinky hair demo.ai – open up the Appearance and Graphic Styles palettes to explore just what I did here, click on some effect names and play with the settings, find something better than I did in ten minutes.
It could use a lot of refinement and maybe I’ll do that sometime soon. But this is a decent start IMHO. One major refinement could be to make an art or scatter brush with some squiggles, and add that as a stroke on the “kinky hair” style.