Tutored Life Drawing Blog Week 23: The Head (Patreon)

The head is an important part of the full body figure drawing, often leading a gesture and being a major element of the model's likeness. Understanding the head is also important for portraiture. Compared to the limbs and torso, the head has less soft tissue, and its bulk comes from the skull. This means that its forms are quite rigid and the most significant changes come from tilting and turning the entire head, plus the change in facial expression.

In this lesson, the focus will be on understanding how to convey the structure of the head by observing key features, looking at drawing the head from different angles, and how soft tissue can change the appearance of the face. This is intended to help with drawing the head as part of the full figure, but these ideas can help with portrait drawing as well.

Main image: 'Elle'

Drawing the Turning Head

Because the head is mostly rigid – the skull is a solid form, and its only significant point of articulation is the jaw, which is both limited in range, and closed most of the time – the biggest effect on observations will be the change in tilt and angle.

As the head turns, the overall shape changes, as do the shapes of the face and orientation of the features. The skull is most narrow in its frontal view, and widens as it turns to a profile.

As the head rotates, it appears wider, with the profile showing the most of the back of the skull. In the profile view, the features only take up a small portion of the head.

When drawing the head, it helps to check the width against its height, as this is both the result of individual likeness – some people simply have a broader head - and the angle it is viewed at. A common issue is underestimating the size of the head in profile views, as it takes up far more space than just the facial features.

Here the masses of the hair and face are simplified into large shapes. Along with the overall shape of the head, these are some of the first things that can be sketched out.

The overall shapes of the face and head are one element of portraying someone's likeness. Lots of observational factors play a role in this, such as how broad or narrow the shape of the head is, whether the contours are soft and rounded, or firm and angular, and the distinctive shapes of the hair and face themselves.

The features of the face owe their placement to the skull, which is rigid. This means that as the head turns, the features change in alignment, but will not move relative to each other. The face can be broken down with proportional markers to help navigate it. Whilst these are an effective starting point, everyone varies in their facial proportions – this is a fundamental aspect of individual likeness – so keep checking observations.

 Features roughly aligned to markers that break the face into thirds. Try to use these lines to align the features across the centreline.

To use these markers, start by placing the centreline of the face. Then find the hair line and break the rest of the face into thirds, with the eyebrows, base of the nose and chin sitting on each marker. By breaking the distance of the nose to the chin into thirds, the mouth can be placed on the top third of this section. If there is no hairline, try to use the eyebrows as a starting point to split the lower parts of the face in two. The ears sit level with the eyebrow and nose, though they can move as the head tilts.

The features are roughly enclosed in a triangle (red) that links the eyebrows to the centre of the upper lip. Parallel lines (blue) are also useful for aligning features.

Besides individual variation, rotating the head and tilting it also distorts the placement of the features, so it is useful to think of how they link up in other ways. Enclosing the features with a triangle helps with indicating their alignment in more tilted angles. It is important to remember that foreshortening will alter the proportions of the face as the head tilts further.

An ellipse that crosses over the centre line of the face helps with placing features at tilted angles.

One thing that is useful to remember when drawing a tilted head is that the features sit on the skull. Whilst the face is somewhat flattened, it is still a round-ish volume, and using an ellipse to align the features – especially with the ear, which is on the side of the head – can help with approximating the volume of the head through the placement of the features.

Anatomy of the Head

The skull is the most important part of the head, making up most of the volume. A relatively small amount of muscle and fat covers it around the face.

This diagram shows some features of the skull that are more noticeable on the surface.

Try to look for ways these features of the skull show up in in the live model, as well as artists' drawings.

Softer tissue covers up much of the skull around the jaw and cheeks (blue), whilst there is less soft tissue around the forehead and cranium (red).

The cranium is particularly rounded, and takes up a large proportion of the head's volume, especially as the head turns towards a profile view. There is little muscle and fat here, and the form of the skull is often covered by hair. Having this rounded form underneath the hair affects the volumes and growth direction, make the hair wrap around it.

The structure of the jaw is an approximate thickened horseshoe shape, though it may not be easy to spot the bone under the soft tissue. This is useful when drawing tilted back heads!

 Here the structure of the jaw is seen from underneath. Aside from understanding its horseshoe shape, look at the angles it creates and compare them to a horizontal or vertical line.

The cheeks are soft and very variable in their form, depending on individual likeness, body fat and facial expression. Due to these softer forms, it is likely that shadow transitions will be more gradual, and contour lines can show this by being more rounded.

Around the head, body fat tends to show most around the cheeks and jaw – here it results in the rounded forms of the cheeks and the contour under the chin.

There are many small muscles in the face. For the most part, these do not add much to the volume of the head, but they are responsible for facial expressions. Unusually, many of these expressive muscles connect from the bones to the skin of the face in order to do this. (Most muscles that articulate the figure attach between bones.)

Muscles contract and pull at the features (red arrows), creating transverse creases (blue lines).

Because expressions are created by muscles pulling skin, creases are formed across the direction the muscles are pulling in. (Much like a drawstring!) Whilst facial expression is too large a subject to cover in this lesson, it is worth remembering that skin generally tends to crease perpendicular to the pull of muscles.

Application in Artworks – Using the Underlying Structure of the Head

 Luca Cambiaso - 'Sketches of Heads' (Source: Art Institute of Chicago)

This page is packed with quick little studies of heads. These show how key the placement of the features is to indicating the structure of the head, and how little detail is needed – the marks do just enough to show how they change as the head is viewed at different angles. It is also worth noting how the heads represent individual likenesses, as their overall shapes vary alongside more obvious elements, like hair style.

 Alphonse Legros - 'Head of a Quarryman' (Source: New York MET)

The ghostly lines at the front of the face indicate the process of seeking out the contour of the profile in this drawing. This particular sketch shows lots of evidence of the underlying skull, partly due to the sitter's likeness, and partly due to the lighting – the shadow falls directly on the 'corner' of the skull created at the temple, casting the front of the face, including the eye socket, into shadow. Underneath, the marks on the cheek are influenced by the structure of the zygomatic bone (cheek bone), and convey a sense of the twisting form of the zygomatic arch under the skin.

Pierre-Paul Prud’hon - Head of a Woman (Source: Art Institute of Chicago)

This drawing shows a head with softer forms, with more fat being evident around the jaw, cheeks and mouth. Because these forms are rounded, the tonal transitions are gradual and even. However, shadows cast by the features, especially the mouth, nose and chin, create firmer edges that follow the surface, curving over the rounded volumes to further convey the idea of soft forms.

A key takeaway from this is to be mindful of both how shadow edges transition, and how they switch from concave to convex curves – keeping an eye on these subtle changes will help with portraying volume in this tricky area of the head.

Key Points to Remember About Drawing the Head

• The overall shape of the head changes with the angle of the head, and individual likeness.
• The features are an important element of indicating the orientation of the head, and can do so even when indicated with simple marks.
• The skull underpins the structure of the head and most of its volume. Softer forms become more dominant around the cheeks and lower half of the face.

Over to You – Getting Practise Drawing the Head

Recommended Materials: Any

Exercise 1: Fast Head Sketches

When drawing the full figure, we only have a short period of time to add the head – maybe a few minutes in a 20 minute pose to 30 seconds or less in a short pose. Ideally, we tend to want to avoid headless figures.

Sketching very quick heads is a great way to practise simplification for this. There are lots of individual approaches, but a good starting point is to sketch out the overall shape of the head and use a cross-hair to sketch out the placement of the features. Don't worry about details! Try to start with some short portrait sketches of up to five minutes, and steadily reduce the time, going down to two and one minute heads – even quicker if you can!

Some 1 minute freehand head sketches. Quick sketches like these are a good loosening up exercise, and help with learning to capture the orientation of the features and overall shape of the head.

Exercise 2: Short Head Sketches

A step up from the first exercise is to work on short head drawings of 10-20 minutes. This is a good length of time to draw the head, as it allows a chance to explore structure and its effect on the features, but is short enough to allow for multiple drawings.

In particular, try to use this to try drawing lots of different likenesses or more challenging tilted angles – this widens the breadth of your practise and helps with learning to draw the head in lots of situations.

These quick sketches where done in 10-20 minutes each.

Exercise 3: Sustained Portrait Drawing

The sustained portrait drawing is the big challenge of drawing the head, where we get the chance to do a head drawing over multiple hours. This a good exercise for becoming more sensitive to surface details, and the forms of the head.

Try to work through your drawing in stages, starting with a contour drawing that lays out the placement of the features and shapes of the head clearly – you have plenty of time, so take care with this early stage. Correct things if needed.

It is good to practise drawing the head over different lengths of time. As we rely on the underlying structure of the skull to place the features, the basic ideas are fairly consistent, so a big part of dealing with different length drawings is managing detail.

A sustained portrait drawing done over several hours.

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Further links

>> Watch the Week 23: The Head main lesson HERE (Student & Life Tiers)  
>> Watch the Week 23: The Head demo HERE (Student & Life Tiers)  
>> You can use any of our portrait photosets for practice - you might find Charlie's short hair particularly useful.

Find links to the whole Tutored Life Drawing Course HERE