Drawing Heads: Draw heads fast, at any angle. Methods I've used throughout my storyboarding career

1. Introduction: So we're going to learn how to draw heads effectively, efficiently and quickly. Hi, I'm Steve Worthington, storyboard artists, sculpture and Illustrator. And I've worked professionally in London, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. And in the course of doing that work, I've had to literally draw a hundreds of heads per day. When you're drawing a storyboard, you're just churning three frames telling a story. You have to be able to draw heads, bodies, anything really, at least to a certain standard, reliably and consistently. Since you also need to be quick if you have to spend time hunting around for reference so that you can draw a head from this angle or that angle or this expression or that expression. It just slows you write down, especially when you're thumbnailing or doing production boards. The key thing is to keep that flow, peak that faucet open. Keep those ideas coming, keep those drawings just churning out in front of you. And if you have to keep stopping to hunt around for this or find a bit of that. It just messes with your flow. So to keep going, you need something quick and reliable. And it can be really simple depending on what you're drawing or a little more involved and complicated. So in this class we will learn how to draw heads at varying levels of complexity from different angles. So you'll be able to draw them looking up, looking down from the left to the right, we'll take a look at the underlying structure, will break the heads down into planes. Take a look at the skull, the individual features, the muscles, and how they affect expressions, and how age affects the face. That'll give you a much better basis to apply light and shade to your heads, whether they are really simple or much more complex. And we'll also take a look at how to test yourself so that you can learn faster. You make mistakes, you recognize those mistakes, you correct those mistakes. So if you'd like to draw better heads, I'll see you in class. 2. Requirements: So here's what you'll need. Whatever you like drawing with, whatever you like drawing on. If you're using traditional, then get yourself some tracing paper. If you're using digital, you can just use a bunch of layers. Another thing that's super handy, fashion catalogs that come in the mail. And they are really good because you can just practice drawing skulls and constructing heads straight over them. Speaking of skulls, I've got this little plastic skull, which is pretty handy for learning to draw. So if you can get yourself one of those, that would be excellent. Also, you can get a ball and draw some ellipses in the axes over it. And that will give you great practice at drawing those ellipses for the brow line and the center line and heavy. Likewise, this clear plastic ball in two parts which I picked up from a craft store, has this scene going around it and the other seam. I may just using a rubber band. Also excellent practice for seeing through and drawing those ellipses on a ball. Likewise, if you fancy drawing on an EKG, this is a paper mesh, a egg. You can use that. It's got the hair line, brow line, base of the nose line, sidelines, and center line. Other than that, all you need is an enthusiasm to improve and a willingness to make some really horrible drawings so that you can find out where you most need to improve. Because that's kinda half the battle. Make your mistakes, identify your mistakes, and then work on improving them. So since I'm assuming you have some pencils and pens and some paper at the very least, then we can get started. 3. Very Simple: Okay, drawing heads can start really simple and get really complicated. So we'll just start off with what so many art directors ever give me in terms of the drawings that they do have heads, which is just an oval with a cross. The cross indicates the direction that the person is looking. So you can actually get quite a lot with this. So that would have them looking down. That would have them looking kind of up over there. So just that very simple thing it's in itself is a great way to draw heads. If you're storyboarding, say some animation sequence or something. And you want to keep the flow going. You don't want to slow down by getting bogged down in all the details of drawing a head. And the next layer of complication that you can add to it is just to lift that line up a little bit so it represents the forehead and then put a pair of eyes and a mouth in there. Now what that allows you to do is be a little more expressive. So hmm, what's going on here then? Are so keeping it really simple, you can even get fairly expressive. And when I'm roughing out storyboard panels, I often don't really go much more complicated than this. So that you get someone being a little happy and we can even throw some me as on there as well. Little bit sad. Oh, you're bearing in mind really is this center line to indicate which direction the head is facing. And this part of the cross. Even if you don't actually draw it years, keep it in mind and then you can place your features based on that. See I put that little too low, say. And you can sort of stretch it out a little bit if you want someone shouting. Now I'm putting these things, this shape in a way that comes with like a lot of understanding of what goes on underneath, like a form of a Scollon stuff, which we'll get to. But for the sake of just a simple head, just a plectrum shape for, for a guitar is another pretty good shape you can use. But just draw lots of ovals with this cross, this crosses key. This cross comes in really important, even when you're getting really complicated and involved in your heads. This is what it's really all about. So draw lots of ovals with this cross and get that sense of which way the head is facing up, down, left and right. And then we will move on to a sense of mass. 4. Loomis Method Quick Overview: So this is a brief overview of the Loomis approach to drawing heads. You start with a bowl, you establish the direction you want it to be facing. You chop off the sides. Use this to put in a construction line. And then you establish the hairline, the brow line, the base of the nose and the chin, which are all equal. Then we undercut the brow, put in a cheekbone, connect the chin to the joe, put in the nose because we know where the base of it is. Can put in our eyes. A would go and we know in the mouth with good. So very quickly. Once you've got the hang of this, you got yourself one head. Let's try it from a different look down. So established direction. And then we chop off the sides of the bowl. And then we put in our construction line, work out where hey line, brow line, base of the nose and chin would be on that construction line and put it in the jaw. We can put in the EIA. We can undercut a brow, and we can put in a cheekbone connect to the side of the chin. We know where the base of the nose is, so we just put in on those and put our eyes. But he's still just a very few key elements. We can work out. Having a head would look. And so there's a head looking down. You use the exact same method if you want to do a head that's looking up, say we establish the direction and we chop off the side of the head and then put in our construction line. So we work out where the hairline would be, base of the nose and the chin on a construction line. Connect at Joe to her chin. Put a racist in to have brow line, put in a cheekbone, put it in the air. And we know where it will dissolve because of the marks we've already made. And we'll get into more detail about that coming up. But for now, this is just what you can do with it really. And then how you do it. We'll deal with next. Set for the incident Nick, put in this side plane here, put it in here as well. And you can do a tricky angles as well. Like let's say the direction is going to be facing down and away from us. So kind of array of three quarter. So the direction of the back of the head to be up here. Front of the head to be down here. So again, we chop off the side. And we know that this is the brow line. And we know that undercuts I'm going to have this cheekbone. And if construction line was down here, we would take the braille on to be here, the base of the nose hair and the chin to be here. So then we can connect the joel to the chin. Put the chicken, we know that it would be here. And the nose would be down here. Back of the head over here, some neck going. And so that's just a real quick overview so that you can use it to construct a hedge pretty relatively quickly from any angle. So if you want to further breakdown of how to do that in more detail, stick around. 5. Bridgman's approach: One of my favorite artists but teaching the drawing of heads and the body in general is George Bridgeman, which he's a very well-known old dead guy. But his main thrust of his teaching is getting a sense of mass so that you draw a blob. And you have to somehow convey that, that blob has some weight to it. It's a thing. It's not just a few lines on a piece of paper. And then the way you get that blob to actually start to look like more of a thing is that you give planes to it so you can like slice off the side. And then that gives you a plane here. And then you still have your sort of curving under the shape. You can slice off the other side as well. And you put yourself a blob of like psych clay or something. And it has that feeling of weight and solidity. And the next thing you would do would be take your blob of clay and that's more or less kind of a block shape. And you would cut yourself out a chunk so that it goes in, comes back out again. So see you put your knife and you've gone in like that and you've gone like that. You've taken out this wedge, this sort of triangular. And it goes, and you've got like a U-shape is basically as they say, you start. So then this is how you start to construct and, and have a sense of mass and form. So you can just throw it a little shadow down there. Little shadow under there. It'll cast shadow. So you've got a definite front side, a definite side. And this undercut, which is definitely in shadow and it's casting a shadow on this upward facing piece. And then from there you can slice in. So your shape would now start looking like, let's, let's do it a little more and looking down point of view. So we have a tip this angle back a little bit as well. So we can tip that back a little bit. And we can have this coming forward. And then we can narrow this down to like where the chin would be. And then and keep the top kinda flat, give out to the back, come out and then up. So that's where it would be as around here. But again, you're just keeping it real simple. You've got this flat side. This flat side which he's just kind of hitting in a little more this way because it's heading towards the chin which is narrow. And again, you've got an overhang. Here we go, This here, you've got the shadow under here. What we're missing a course is that piece that sticks out here, which would be the news of course, said we can just put in ourselves and nose. So just keeping the shapes really simple by getting a real sense of three-dimensionality. That's the key to the whole thing, or a key to the whole thing. The other one being of course that cross I mentioned earlier, which we'll get to later. The shapes that Bridgeman likes to work with. Invoke the forehead. But the block that would indicate the forehead. So we can put that here. We'll make that a little bit more like that. And then the shape of a block that would represent the sort of cheekbones and the cheek area. So we can put that in like that. And then you've got this cylindrical sort of can shape which would go in here. So in order to fit that in, we'll just chop out a little piece of this block. And this is why mass and thinking in terms of volumes and masses is important. So you can start thinking about you a bit of a woodworker. You're kind of chopping away at things and making them fit together. Interlocking of shapes. That's another very, very important concept. And then we have a triangle shape down here. And I'll just fitting the whole thing inside this square I drew originally this block just keeps me organized so I can kinda keep all my lines hitting in the right direction. And this is wider at the back than the front side. It's kind of triangular and it kind of goes up a little bit to that would be the lower jaw. And then we just fill out some BOC Tustin coded ahead. And again, you you can shade the side because you've made a decision. These are the planes. This is the front, this is the side, this is the top. This is also the side of this block here. And like, you know, obviously this isn't what a head looks like in any sense of like very, very hyper-realistic or anything like that. But the concept is that you're starting to notice these, these shapes. Look at heads, look at photos of heads, look at people on TV, and start looking out for these shapes, how this shape over hangs. And then we can put down though you're seeing, put those in there. And you get this sense that that is basically what our head is constructed off. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that which we'll get to. But the big, the big picture is forward facing planes, upward facing planes, planes that are often facing the sides. Curved planes which form the structure of the teeth and put your lips over there. But you have to bear in mind all these structures when you start building out this, the soft tissue on top. So we can draw this thing from multiple viewpoints. I'll just a more sort of sitting on the ground. We're on the ground level. We're looking up at it in a little bit. So we could start with the with the triangle shape first and the other side of that would probably be about there. Then we can put our cannon on top of it. Then we can put out slightly tilted back representation of the cheeks. And we can chop out that piece just to fit in nicely. And then we can put in this Well, you've a hang for the forehead. We can put the forehead in there. Take that back. And we can overlap this a little bit and do a little bit of motifs and 10 and type whatever joint that would be. But interlocking things, getting a, getting a feeling of interlocking things, just get used to the idea of doing that. And then we've made some decisions. We've drawn our shapes. We can delineate them a little better. Put out jaw bone in here. And just put in some BOC that has to fill out the back. And again, so now we can, having decided what is facing in which directions, we can put some light and shade on it. This time we could like say, light the sides and have the front in shade. So you'd end up with and if I light source is fairly low, these angles facing up would, would also be in shade. So you'd end up with something a little bit like that. And that's of course not forget to put ourselves in those in there. There might be some light hitting this part of the nose, but we already threshold on nasa we went worry about that. Could add a little bit down to here. Why is it will give it a little shade on there as well. So these are the shapes we're going to be going to be playing with is just just rectangular. Let me just a little bit under there. Rectangular shapes, kind of flat flattish rectangular shapes. Shapes that flare out at one end. So I don't entirely squared and make it be thicker at the back when at the front. Cylinders. For here. To a certain extent, bowls and oval shapes. Triangles with a flattened off end, cylinders with half of them cutoff. So we could just be using this of a cylinder. So make sure you're comfortable drawing all these volumes from different angles and just play with fitting them together and overlapping parts of them into these kind of face shapes. This is a pretty good template to start with. Say, just draw this arrangement and imagine it from all different points of view. And I gotta get keeping that feeling of mass and solidity. Say Be decisive about what's your front once you sign it and where your light is coming from. And say in this case, that's what we're working with. And all the while we're doing this, be very aware of a center line and draw it. And if you want to, because you'll be constructing all this stuff either side of a center line. So it's something you always need to be aware of. And to make yourself aware of it, I would include it as often as you can. So keep drawing in those center lines. We can have SLOs, a center line here. Could have ourselves a center line here. We could put one across here. And through here, could bring one forward there. So mass volume, some sense of white and symmetry. So put those center lines in a, bear them in mind at all times. So we've started to get a real sense of mass and fitting together in interlocking of solid, solid volumes, which we're rendering two dimensionally. But with a feeling of three-dimensions. We stop pushing them together, cutting pieces out of them, and starting to construct a head shape which has very distinct planes. The purpose of this really is to just be decisive. Have a front, Heaviside, have a top and a bottom, and just throw some shade on them as well, just so that you'll kind of testing that you've got that sense of solidity. And then we'll move on to the next one. 6. More on the Loomis Method: So here's how Andrew Loomis simplified the head. And I'll just do like three of them. First you start with a bull and you chop off the sides. Say chop off the side, then the other side, which wouldn't really make much difference. And then you draw a line around the middle, straight there. And then you draw a line around the middle this way. And that gives you your center of the, this is the brow line. There would be another line running around that corresponds with the top of of this ellipse. So looked at from the front. Let's do a little front of you here. We've got chopped off sides like way connect those two and that's your hair line. The line through the middle would be your brow line. That would be via eyebrows would go. The next thing to do is get that stick going down from this cross here. So it just goes straight down, which would be like this toothpick here. And that will give you your base of the nose. And the chin. Base of the nose lines up with the chopped off the pot and have to imagine this is just gone. So the bottom of that circle there would be lining up to the base of the nose and the chin would be the same distance below. So you divide it up into hairline to brow line to base of the nose, to the chin. So this would be the base of the nose. Is a B, the chin. And this would be the hair line, brow line based on the nose. Chin. And you can put your is in this. Let's do a side view. Is going in this section of the chopped up, so they call this the flattened pot. And from there you draw a vertical line. Base of the nose. glad chin here. Hello, I am here. Say. So in a nutshell. Let's say you get to a head using the Loomis method. And then you have to have a side plane so the side of the forehead area cuts back in. Remember had cut back in we were looking at before. This is like an overhang. So that's what's happening here. So that's cutting back in. And then the cheek bone comes down. The widest part is about here. And then it kind of narrows a little bit more into the face. So heads down and in from this point. And the widest part of the face is here. The widest part of the whole head is about here. So let's just put that line in there. From this point here, which would be about there. I kinda down and forward. And then on the other side, we have to go across to the other side, put our point in, and then come down and forward a little bit and say that we're just pretty a very tiny line. And then your chin is here. Although it joy is coming down here, connecting to the chin. And then we can just connect this cheek area to the side of the chin here. And that will give us our side plane. And then we can put that news in. And that is kind of the center line goes back a little ways down. Then the nose sticks out from there. So we can draw ourselves a triangle wedge. It goes back up to there. So that's our nose. So there's a a triangle wedge kind of goes in a little bit here. And then the nose sticks out from there. It gets a little wider towards the bottom. Cuts back, no sticks out. So now we're starting to see the shape of the head kind of develop and we haven't put in a mouth or eyes yet. We'll just concerning ourselves with the basic head shape and how this method allows you to rotate it through any angle and still come out with the same thing. So again, we have the is which go between the base of the nose and the brow line. So here's the brown line. Trace it around and it goes straight back their base of the nose. So here's this line. Here. Here's our recess cutting back here. This cheekbone, which goes from its widest point of the face, which is about here. Kinda goes down and forwards and little way. So we can put that in there. Why it is part of the head is here. So when I aside view, that would be kind of about that. So overall, head would look like look like that. And we can just throw in our eyeball was an indication of the mouth. The mouth fits into. Like the it's not exactly in the middle. Like the middle of the distance between the tip of the nose down at the base of the nose and the chin would be about fuel halfway, that'll be bad the bottom of the mouth. So that's where your mouth tends to go. So halfway between here and here will be here. So that'll be the bottom of your mouth. And is fit in between the brow line and the base of the nose. And you just extend those lines around to find the is on the head at various angles. So he would do ahead. It was chopped off those side bits. Put a brow line in there, put a center line in there, drop ourselves a line down here, and look at where I had a line would be. So so basically the nose, hair line, brow line, base of the nose and chin. And it goes kind of in this bottom area, quarter of that circle there. And we have to take a forehead block and reassess it back so that we can do that. And then we can put our cheekbone coming down and slightly forwards. And we'll take that point extended across to the other side. And that's a little behind this, but it's also a little wider. So that would be about there. Then it comes in a bit base of the nose, taking them others in. Drop a angle of the jaw down here, connect that to the chin. Same thing on the other side, but you wouldn't really see it because this would be in the way. So that when you put your eyes in, it depends on the angle of the head as to how much of the other eye you see and how much the news covers it up. But when you, when you start thinking in terms of just the simple blocks and shapes, you don't get so caught up with like having to feel like you have to see the other eye and stuff like that. It's very easy to stop pulling out the side of the face that is disappearing around. But when you're just keeping it in the, to the simple forms, you then discover when you actually do the work over and start to draw your features. And he's like, Oh, I can see, I wouldn't see how the anything of the eye there. And then the mouth is bottom of the mouth. Top of the mouth, and the mouth is fitting around that. Remember from earlier, we had a cylinder. Without shape on top of the cylinder, that was the cheekbones that we're tilted back a little bit. And then our forehead was sticking out above that. And so we've got the same thing going on here. And the mouth fits around that cylinder. So when you're putting in points, especially the corners of the mouth, you have to bear in mind that the math itself will go all the way around to the other side. So UMC, the other side there and you will just and because this part of the upper lip, he's angled upwards, you'll see the underside of that with the head tilted back a little and not so much the lower lip, you'll see less of that. So we can put side plane. And again, let's do another angle. This time. Let's have the head be looking down this way. So here's a cross, his outline which we dropped down. And we need to do that chopping off of the ellipse there. Chopping off the edge of the bowl, chop off the other side of it too. And then we can work out the hairline. And then we can push that push that forward onto a stick like I was up and down. So hairline, brow line, base of the nose, chin. So because we're looking down, the chin is like wavy line to this circle here. So simple. Once again, we just work the brow line around, cut back in. So we have that shape that goes like that cutting shape. And then can base of analysis here. So that means I noticed has to stick forwards. So we can draw ourselves a triangular wedge sticks forward like that. We know that the ear goes in this bottom area section of this. So we can put the a there. We can drop down a jaw line, take that down to the chin. And likewise on the other side, if you could see that it would be kind of hair and then come down to there. And if you had Bible was in there, just have to be careful to keep everything lined up properly. I'll get into that in the next thing. And cheekbone there. Come on down and the widest point of the face, widest point of the face on the other side comes down and in. And then we can drop that line down to the chin. And now we have side plane again. Side of the nose and mouth in there. I'll just bring that shape down there. Let me do the front eliminated this side of the nose, side planes and front planes. So a straight three-quarter view. Without looking up or down, you can put a line through the middle there and bring that line. Okay, We troppo fast sides work. I have my line, brow line, base of the nose gene. Now we can divide this up so we put area in here. This would be kind of over here somewhere. So you wouldn't see it. Centerline, back a little way, stick out for the nose. Let's do a triangle shape here. Front of the nose, side of the nose. And they're under cut. The all important undercut. And then the widest part of the face coming down and forward slightly. Why does Paul the face down and forward slightly. Take my line down to the chin. Halfway there between the base of the nose and the chin is the bottom of the mouth. So don't forget the mouth goes around that cylindrical shape. So if the corner of the mouth is here, it would be going around the other side. And you wouldn't see, have a mouth be like that. And if you wanna do a center line, you can go around the chin. And then back in again up to the bottom lip, around the bottom lip, out for the top lip again and again for the middle of the nose and follow the head around like that. And again, we can just connect up planes. Just put a nice side flat tone in there. And it gives everything a nice sense of form. I'll try and extreme angle where crosses like looking very much up. So we can troppo fast sides. Work, I hail line. And then this line comes down. And so we have to figure out from this point, that would be on, on our imaginary stick. That will be there. That would be the brown line. That would be the base of the values, that will be the chin. So in this instance, the chin is within a circle. Our original bowl that we drew because it's lifted up, so we are seeing in front of that. So if we have IA here, we can bring joy. I'm been chin, forehead with this undercut here. And then we have the widest part of the face, which is a little behind here. And then it comes down and forward slightly. So we could just do my little rely on that and then extend that extend that across to the other side. That point, which would be so little further back than this, but again, it's a little wider out so that we're pushed out of the way and then it comes down and forwards a little bit. So that line seems quite long there. It seems almost nothing there. But that's how it would look. And then the base of the nose, we can draw a triangle sticking straight out like this way. Take that back in. Because I line comes down, cups in, a little white, comes back out again. We can put in the rest of that triangle. And the distance between there and there halfway would be the bottom of the mouth. Top of the mouth, corner of the mouth, and the other angle of the jaw. And then we can put some neck in here. Eyeballs would be sunk into here. And again with your eyeballs, you need to be super careful to to keep them lined up properly. And again, you hardly see any much I will behind the nose then there's other details. But for the sake of just a basic kind of getting a head in there. And that's what we need to worry about for now. Let's try really extreme angle. So we'll have a look in way up. So it's actually easier to choose sides of a bull. Before we put this line down here, because we can put this dividing line down here as a line that goes around the pool would go around the equator of it. And that gives us an opportunity to put in a vertical line. We can see what angle it would be. Say, you can just match the out there. So again, we have the hairline which is so far up and around that we don't even really see it. So we'll call the hairline here. Brown line here, base of the nose here, chin. Chin. Base of the nose. Browse. Again, we cut those back and then we're going to be looking what up into the the recessed area here. So that's going to be very obviously viewable. And then we've got the widest part of the face back here, becomes kind of down and forwards. So that's pretty much going to be horizontal lines. So we'll cut across here. Put that same line in which would basically just be adult because each end of it would be just kinda looking straight at me. And then we can put them alpha1. And a chin is here. So we can drop a line down with the area here. And the other the other Joe would be kind of about here. And it gets a little tricky when you're drawing jaws this angle because the lines that kind of weird. So I usually just kind of connect them in the sense that focus on that line more than well then the line of the jaw when you're looking up at it like this. And then we can draw some neck. And I'm going to put our eyeballs in here. And sodium center line goes down here. Root of the nose comes out. And the sides of the nose a bit lower. Let me get back up to there. So there's a kind of triangular nose shape that has a mouth shape. And here's a chin. So now we can start connecting up these. Bringing that down to the side of the chin as we've been doing before. So now we've got a form that you can reliably construct the form of the head in all these weird angles. Using this method. When you do get to these really extreme views, figuring out these crosshairs and exactly what the vertical angle is in the horizontal angle can get a little tricky. Which is why my preferred method is kind of a combination of was a combination of Bridgeman Loomis and just adding a little satellite, which is a cube to your initial sort of planning, if you'd like, which is the ball of the head. So I'll get into that in the next one. But basically, you start with your bowl and then you figure out what angle you want to be drawing. And you work it out from there. 7. The Satellite Cube: So why would you like the Loomis approach for getting used to drawing heads from all different angles with the addition of my little cuboidal satellite. So I'll show you what I mean. So first we can work out where I crossed with go. Cross would be facing slightly off to the upper left. And then we can trump that side off with an ellipse that would mirror that one puppy a little smaller. So let's put that there. And likewise over here, just take a little hair off the edge there. So now we can work out that our line would become kind of down here. And we can draw a face plane if you like. So we would have a line going this way. So we've got a couple of lines going this way. And then this line to indicate little cube. And this will come in super handy as you will see. So now we can use these lines to help us put in these and these other lines. So we'll just keep everything kind of parallel. And we're working out the base of the nose and the chin down this imaginary line here. And the hairline would be like where the top of this is, so that the bottom version of it would be their top version of it would be sort of here on airline. So the place of the nose would be corresponding to the bottom of this ellipse, which would be put a little line in that just to where they connect would be about there. So brow line, bottom of the nose. Same distance down again, more or less for the chin. And so the chin is getting fairly close to the bowl here. If it was ticked up even more, the chin would actually fall within the outline of the bowl. And if it were tilted down, the chin would be further away. But we'll get to that. Now. We can just put a recess back in here. And we can use these lines to make sure that we're keeping everything lined up nicely. So for example, when we put in our cheekbones, we want the cheekbone to sort of stub out why it a little bit and come down forward and in a bit. So from here to here. So it's coming down forward and in a little bit. So this is the widest point. This is slightly narrower, but it's still pretty wide of a wide part of the face. This whole structure of the cheek with the cheekbone underneath is the widest part of the face. Why this part of the head is back here. And so we use this line again to line up these two points on the other side. So this point would be out and back slightly of this point here. So come about there and it will come down forwards. Say, Well, I think that would go to about there. And we have the base of our nose. And we can extend a line out from the center of the base of anos. And you'll notice that it's actually landing exactly over the other line, which was the cheekbone. So it would just hide it basically say, and then we draw in if we're putting our center line or along the top of the forehead here, it would kind of head back a little way. And then the nose would spring from a point from the side. If we've gone to we've got a recess. So this is the center line for the nose would come from a recess is a little further back around, so it would be from here. So at recess comes in like that. But then those can spring forward with the base of it would be lining up with the bottom of this circle here. And so there's the base of atomos. This part is slightly further forward than the wings of the nostrils. So this point would be slightly further forward than these two points which kind of hit back a little ways. So we can end up with a shape a little bit like that. And then take that back to this point here. And then another thing worth noting, and I'll draw another circle for this. And this is a brow line. And this is the bottom of our nose. So the top of our nose, center line comes down, then it goes in. So the top of our nose is say here, there's going to have a triangular wedge. The heads back. You'll see all this when you look at the skull. And then the nose. The wings of the nostrils. Nostrils themselves be under there. And the air. In this segment here, the back lower segment. And then we have lower jaw, which comes down and we've got chin here, mouth here. And as you notice, so 123, put it, put that Joe here. We've chopped off those sides. We've got a recess. Good a cheekbones, cheeks generally. And then we can just bring those down to the jaw. And we have a jaw line coming out and up as well with the is occupying the space between the eyebrows and the base of the nose, around the side of the head. And the widest part of the actual hit itself, widest part of the face is out here. Widest part of the head itself is this pot here. So I've kind of like a bowl which here put a jaw in here. And we can use this line again to find the angle of the jaw on the other side. And we remember the alkaline was here. So we'll bring that down so the jaw. And that's pretty much what the shape of the head looks like. And we need to accommodate the features. The mouth itself. Oftentimes will be about halfway down between the bottom of the nose and the chin, the bottom of the mouth. So we can just indicate where our mouth would actually be. We're not gonna go into any details right now. We're just focused on the shape of the head generally. And then again with this line here, we can line up our eyeballs and make sure that they're reassessed. And two there. So we go ahead and mu's as is. And who put a mouse in here? And connect the side of the chin to this point here. Put a cheeks in here, bring that down. So that's why I like this little satellite, because when you're putting, plotting these points across the face, you need to bear in mind the center line. And what we have is chin comes out. This bottom part of the mouth of the lower lip is here. And then this part is beneath the lower lip and goes down. And in this pie here, say, so this part here, There's in upper lip, comes back out again. And then back in, back out, back in, back out and around and over the top. And when we're plotting our points either side of our ball, we need to bear in mind this center line and how forward and back they are as well. So with the nose being further forward than the cheek points the nose very often for my views like this, covers up the other cheek and a lot of the other eyeball. So we can apply little shading. Just to make use of those planes we've created. Side of the nose, side of the head. Same thing here. And there are lots of other little structures and stuff which we'll get to later. The influence, the shading of the, of the face and the head. For now. We'll just keep it simple. So once you get the hang of it, you can start drawing faces and heads in all different angles. So let's say we're going to draw one. Going up, looking down this way. We're facing this way. I guess looking depends on where's eyes are facing. So anyway, children outside of lines here, that line painting parallel to that line. And then we have our halfway down line here. So now we can draw a line across here. And we can just then replicate these lines to create our little cube that we can reference. I mean, you could draw a pair of glasses onto our head if you want to save yourself the trouble of drawing that Cuban still have those reference points. Anyway. Hairline, Brown, Brown point, base of the nose and the chin. And you'll see that the chin is further away from the bowl. Further away from the bowl them when it's looking up. So it goes here. So there's ahead looking in that direction. Let's try something a little trickier. We'll draw our head looking down and from the back. So this cross would be on the back of the head. So the, the front of the head would be across will be sort of about here. So tricky. What do we do? We come down to the to the brow line. We'll have our undercut. We have sticking out and forwards pile. We have the jaw. And then somewhere down below here, we'd have the chin. I'll just edge the chin a little bit to there. And then we can see a little bit more face. And the nose would be, let's say, knows it be sticking forward from about here. So the nose would be quite low down and the air occupying the space here. And for looking up, Let's do looking up. From behind again. Said we'd have an ear here. We'd have the undercut going in here and the Cheekbone here, and then we would put in our angle of the jaw. So it's always good to put in fairly early on because it pretty much follows this line. We would have front of the face kind of around here. Chin. Let's see how far. Hey line, brow line, base of the nose. Chin, chin here. So brown line, basis of the chain base of the nose. So if we saw any knows it would be kind of a little higher up, like let me draw a line around the back. Put some neck in there. So we're just using this really simple method. And I'm using these lines are not necessarily drawing this cube because I'm just using these lines and referring to them and figuring out through the form as I draw. But if it's more helpful to put this, I mean, certainly I did a long time for a longtime use this little cube off to the side. And I would recommend it because you can end up with so many lines kind of confusing you inside of the area that you're drawing with just having something standalone like that is super-helpful. So in this particular instance, it would look kind of like that front side to be around there. And in this instance, little cube would like that with the front side here. So let's end with a three-quarter view. Looking up. So we draw a cross. We can see that plane of the face would be looking up in this direction. So we can mirror this ellipse here for chopped off section. And we can use this line to help us out with a cube. This is the cube representing the side, bottom, and front planes. And again, we just draw using these lines. I usually prefer to put these lines in first and then work out the cube from that. But anyway, that super handy jaw line that we can bring down from here. And we can work out how hairline to the brow line to the base of the nose, to the chin. And because it's tilted back, the chin is not far away from the circle. So we can put our door in here and we can use this line to figure out where the opposite corner of the jaw would go. And we can put in our recess and a recess doesn't go all the way out to this chopped off by starts a little further in. So it goes back and an out a tiny bit. So there's a recess checkout points. And then we can put our cheekbone in stocks from little further back and further out to the side and comes forward down and in a little bit. So likewise, we'll put a point on the other side. Do the same. And then we have About knows, which we will then push forward this way, making that triangle center line of the mouth and the chin and the nose all the way back to here, forward and back on over. And don't forget that little triangle shape, which we will be aware of once we've had a good look at the skull. And then we just connect this to the side of the chin. Put the erin couple of eyeballs sent back in there. Again, being careful to make sure that their Level II placed on both sides give ourselves a little bit of indication of the mouth. And so there's another pretty simple head and another angle worked out using this same method. So draw at least four balls, work out the chopped off part. The crust sits on that cross that sits on the front of the face or the back of the head so that you kind of by inference nowhere. The other one is if you're looking at back view. And then we'll take a look at the skull and some of the features. 8. Using Magazines: Another good way to practice this is drawing over magazines, like clothes, magazines that come through the mail and stuff. My wife gets bunches of those, so I just tend to hijack from time to time. So what you could do is you usually have the same model for a bunch of pages. So you can just chop out all the faces and stick them on a piece paper. And then you can lay a sheet of tracing paper over it and just start putting in those, those key points. So you start with the circle. You cut off the sides. You put your brow line in, put your undercut in here. And these were all traced over. I'm not using the actual magazine because I don't know what a copyright DNAs on stuff like that. Using someone else's stuff in your tutorial? Yes. So we've got to have chopped off side here. And you can just put in those key little lines I was talking about. And then you can just fill in the blanks. But you can see what they look like on a real person and what kind of a person. So you picked you pick the person that you're that you're tracing for whatever reason. And that's the kind of head that these lines are going to obviously form the structure of. And then you can pick another kind of head and compare the differences because everyone's heads are a little bit different. So you can start comparing the two or three or four, however many you wanna, you wanna do. So you can see pretty quickly there. Once you've established these lines, it's really easy to put in some semblance of a, of a head. There's a Bible was in there. Put a mouth in the cell with the minimum number of lines. You can feel yourself out ahead pretty quickly. Here's a similar thing, but I just got into a little more. I was more concerned with features and stuff. So I was putting in the basic shapes and just getting a little more of an idea of how the eyelids relate to the eyeballs and mouths and noses, and how big they are, how much they stick out, and they wrap around. So there's a few examples of that. A great way to build a framework upon which to draw ahead. Because the main parts of the actual structure of the head is just built around a ball and it's just a few lines that you can put in pretty quickly. You just have to know where those lines up with what they relate to underneath. So it's not like you just draw a few lines around a ball. You have to know how they relate to the skull for the most part. So learning how to draw the skull is another good and useful thing. 9. Starting With a Cylinder: Let's take a quick look at constructing heads on a cylinder. Say Hey, it would be a cylinder. Hey, it would be another cylinder. We would need to establish the front. Which, which direction is pointing, say. So that way. And then we can just follow curves around the cylinder and then build it out that way. So if we were going to start with the hairline, say here, and we would divide this up into three. So the chin here, the mouth here, the nose here. We can draw our line, we can draw out brow line. And we can put it in an undercut. So that's slices in that way. And we can put in base of the nose, putting that chin, we can put in our mouth cheekbones. If this is the front and then we have this is the side. So we know where we're putting our AI. We just follow this line around and we know that the IAEA goes in between the brow line and the base of the nose. So we can put a a and then we can just kind of fill in the blank. So if you like working with curves particularly and all the straight lines are less appealing, you can give this a try. Just bear in mind the center line. Always keep that center line in mind. Cause kinda dictates or in forms anyway, all your other well, you have other choices for fitting any features and more heavy. And likewise here if we have someone, we're looking down on what we can put our hair line in, just ignore that one. Put a hairline in. We can put out brow line, nose, chin. Say I am brow line. And again we can if this is Santa, we can cut out our recess. So cut that back in in there. So there's forehead. And then we can put in the base of n MOS, can push, let's say a line would be from those would be sticking out this way. And the line would began this way. So even though, even though we're using curves, you'll still going to need to reference these lines for keeping everything kind of lined up properly. The danger with curves is that things can start floating around. So you just have to ground everything in, in a few straight lines to connect. Keep an eye on stuff. So here's the base of the nose, there's the nose. The nose gang in there. Say fast center line goes like this. And we have the corner of the mouth here to put the other corner of the mouth like round the other side of that curve. Because our mouth is a curvy sort of barrel shape that we're working around. Under the lower lip. Chin. We can work our way around. And again, we knew that the is. Fall in between the brow line and the base of the nose. So we can put in here and then just fill in the blanks. And again, we need to reference this line to bring this through here. And once you start getting used to constructing and you get used to the shapes and the relative positions of things. You'll find this gets quite sort of instinctive. You definitely get used to it, but it takes awhile. So don't get discouraged that learning to build things in a constructive way. It doesn't just kinda of land in your lap as easy as you like. Definitely takes a bit of getting used to and you have to work at it. And you have to think about things in different ways. Sometimes you're thinking in straight lines to line things up. Other times you're thinking more curvy. So try drawing some heads based on cylinders. Just remember that you have your hairline. You have your rest of your cylinder divided up into three. So you've got your chin, bottom of nose, browse, hairline, top of the head. And just have some fun with that. And of course, bear in mind that those is go in between the brow line and the base of the nose once you follow that line around the side of the cylinder. So if it's looking, if it's tilted down, is tend to be higher up on the sides. And if it's tilted up, 123 and there's a sideline, frontline. The IS will be between the brow line and the base of the nose. So try constructing some heads around a cylinder and see how you like that. You'll no doubt one to probably add a little bit more bulk to the back of the head. Since the cylindrical approached us tend to lead to rather tall thin heads. And don't forget to reference the front line, the sideline, and draw a center line. The kind of follows the contour of the face. 10. Planes: So planes, a flat plane is pretty much just that doesn't have to be square. Of course you could have a round flat plane. That would be an ellipse because we're looking at it in perspective. You can also have planes that are curved. And you can have planes that kind of convoluted. This will be a selection of flat planes forming a convoluted overall shape. You can have planes that are curved and kind of wavy. And you can combine all of the above into other shapes. And when we're dealing with heads, obviously, they're not like scored pieces of paper with very sharp edges. But we're working out some planes that we can use to simplify constructing a head. And to give you a quick kind of tone plan when you're having lightened shade cost on it. So that's why thinking and reducing things to more simpler planes is preferable, especially when you're constructing a head from from your imagination and not referring to anything. Of course, these curvy planes gradually transition from light into the shadow side and back again. That would be in the shadow. That would be in the shadow. And you'd have like costs shadow under there. This would of course be much flatter and shop. You might, if the light was coming in at enough of an angle, I have a little bit of cost shutter their costs shadow under there and under there. And a little bit of a cast shadow under here as well. So when we take a shape like this and we sort of simplify it down. I mean, you could simplify it down into a simple kind of triangular shape or you could go like this. So that's got like 33 planes. Which is why when you're looking at the planes of the face, you can kind of not be super literal with them because if they were super literal, that's exactly what a real face would look like. And it doesn't. So this draw ourselves ahead. And we'll put in some planes. And so his nose and is the undercut. And we're keeping this fairly simple. And then we have the cheekbone and the chin. We'll put ourselves a little upward, a little more sit down facing plane here. And we can just put a little up facing plane above it, just sort of simplify the chin. And then we have the mouth and the lips and the bottom lips. And then the overall shape that goes around the mouth, which is simplify that down to from the corner of the nose here. So the corner of the mouth, from the corner of the mouth back to this part of the chin here. And then we have at a gang in here, back of the jaw. Now from this point, you already have kind of options depending on the shape of the face and what kind of expression it might be in. Typically tend to just go straight down to the bottom of the chin. Here. But it might, there might be a plane change from here to here that's quite noticeable. So you might want to put that in. And there also might be this muscle that goes in here that closes the jaw. There might be a plane change between these two. So it kind of just depends. I mean, I suppose you could put all of them in. And then suppose the back of the head goes. Just keep this simple. And so there's a very simple planar head that you can stop playing with and revolving in space. And another thing you can do is just change the proportions and you get an entirely different kinds of heads. Say for example, we could draw a head. And this plane shape here. We could have a little more upright. And we could bring this in more. This triangle. We could bring the cheekbones little further forward. Could make them those WIDA. Okay, So forehead to browse to chin. We could bring this mouth area a little further forward. Let's bring that out to here and put the a is in back of the head. So if I just darken in these lines. So this head is h2 at different looking to this head. When you're designing characters and stuff, if you working on like a comic book or something like that. Skip to figure out well these things ahead of time so that you can draw your characters and keep them consistent throughout. One of my favorite planes is this one right here. Which is something I noticed when I saw sort of people with glasses on and wearing a mosque. Say, the mosque went around here. And the Clausius came out to here. And I just noticed that this plane faces up and it seems to exist quite happily between this part of the mosque, this little string that goes around your ear and the arm of the glosses that goes back over the ear. Just a little thing I happened to notice when I was in the store the other day and I looked at a bunch of people as I was wandering around and it seemed pretty consistent. I didn't notice one person whose head didn't seem to have this plane just kinda went straight down. Which I thought was quite interesting. An interesting variation. And it's these variations that you pay attention to when you're drawing different characters. And the more defined they are at this stage, when you start layering over the top with details of features and stuff that will remain very distinct characters. I'm gonna do another dome fairly doing MY head and bring the nose out foods quite a long way. And put the loops in here. Bring the a is in here. I have some quite wide cheekbones putting them into here. And remembering this shape of the mouth, back up to there. So there's three fairly different shaped heads. But with the same plan. You just rearrange the proportions of things. And a plane. You can keep this plane curved and have this plain square. And because we're kind of forcing an organic shape into these rather kind of rigid angles. Sometimes you have to allow yourself a little bit of leeway. Especially with areas like the the mouth and the mouth shape that comes down and around. And on the other side too. And let's also not forget the all important center line, which we can run over. And just draw one in profile, brow to nose, to the chin and cheekbone. And put the air in here. Actually this is where a little bit too big. So I'm going to have to increase the size of this circle. A bit. Happens from time to time. So planes. And once you get past this point here, and it's all pretty sort of there's not that much going on in terms of complicated bits and pieces to get the hang of. And let's try one. From the front. The sides chopped off, slightly wider up here. Good. A little triangle which then divide it up into thirds. Put the mouth in here. So we can have a nose. Take that down to the corner of the mouth. We've got chin, bottom lip, top news, undercut, where the eye sockets, cheekbones will take this down to here. Putting the job. And we'll just indicate that change of plane from the cheekbone down to the angle of the jaw. And then the widest part of the head is here. And we have this up facing plane, which I mentioned David here. There are obviously much more detailed PaaS, but this is keeping it simple. So we can just draw it from different angles. So DRE, so if a bunch of heads keep to this fairly simple plan of planes and move them into different positions. Try out different proportions and just see what different kinds of heads you can get. 11. Skulls: So heads and faces have got bony bits which reliable kind of landmarks and very squishy Deformable Parts which you want to be able to definitely refer to the reliable bony parts and know what kind of distortions can happen to the squash teapots. So here those heads that we did earlier, and what I did was I drew skulls over those heads. And I thought this is a good opportunity to figure out where I go wrong when I draw skulls as well. So I drew them without using any reference. And then I picked up a couple of plastics goes when I was done to see where I went wrong. And so these lines in red, my self corrections, I was finding that I put the teeth line a little bit too low in this one, and also in this one. Just some minor bits and pieces that I like to know about so that I can draw a better SCO next time. And this is a great way to learn. Draw something, make a decision, make a wrong decision by amines. Then compare it to what you know to be right, and then you can at least no way again wrong and continue to improve. I didn't go too wrong because I've been doing this for a long time and I've probably drawn hundreds of skulls. But it is a good way to learn. So here are the new improved schools. And what I'm doing now is indicating in this blue color some sort of good, reliable bony landmarks that pretty much don't change. So they're good parts of the skull to really focus on. And they would be the cheekbones, which protect the eyes, the whole cranium, which obviously protects the brain. And the lower jaw, which is movable or this other stuff is fixed and immovable with the lower jaw hinges back here and is movable. So you want to know where that is in relationship to everything else. And you want to keep all the parts of the main part of the skull property in relationship to each other. And here in this purple color, I have indicated the kind of areas of the face that really can get squashed and deformed. I would also say the actual cheekbones themselves. If there's fat, when certain muscles contract, you get like a bulging there as well. And these these red lines here, again just indicates certain key shapes and relationships of angles between certain parts. The, it's really good to home in on when you're learning to draw skulls. Because these are the parts you want to always kind of get right relative to each other. And when you're learning to draw skulls, a very important part to pay particular attention to is this kind of Keystone sort of wedge shape, which occurs in-between the eye sockets, forming a certain part of the eye socket. And arising from it are the nasal bones. But this, this little shape here, It's kind of triangular with the, with the end cutoff is something to look out for. And when you're learning to draw skulls that is of prime importance to the center of the whole construction of the head. That cross that we keep starting with. This is right where that crosses. It's the root of the nose and separates the eye socket. So be very mindful of that. 12. Muscles of Expression: So let's take a look at some of those many muscles which make this part of the head so completely changeable. So we've got the circular muscles of the eyes, which go around the eyelids and open and close those. This can raise the eyebrows. So you get these kind of crinkling of the forehead. And these bring the eyebrows down. So more crinkling of the forehead there. This muscle here pulls the eyebrows towards each other. So more crinkling there. I'm not going into the names of all these things mainly because I didn't know that what that what they are. Long as you know that they exist and what they do, and the kind of changes that they have on the surface form. So this is another circular muscle like the one that goes around the eye that basically connects to the lips. And main purpose is to close the mouth and purse the lips into sort of a kissing type position. And this muscle here pulls the door, closes the mouth. So basically it's a biting muscle for holding the mouth closed. This muscle serves the same function, attaches to the top of the arm of the lower jaw. About here, underneath the cheekbone. There's like a tunnel that goes through there. So this muscle is attached to this part of the jaw bone and pulls it this way. So also helps to close the jaw and hold it closed. These muscles arise from the bony part of the cheek area here. And they go in and they attached to the soft tissue, could be connective tissue. Around the mouth, could be other muscle fibers or the inside of the skin. So what these muscles do is they pull back towards the cheeks. And so what happens is when something contracts, which is pulled back towards its origin, you get like creases, sort of 90 degree angle to that. Say if we're pulling things this way, the creases will occur across that. And you can see what I mean there. So these muscles are pulling the mouth back towards the cheek and you get a big fold appear here. And the cheeks get really quite swollen and big. So these muscles that attach around the mouth and head off upwards and outwards in these directions are generally considered happy muscles. Because they tend to pull back your upper lip into a smile. And so that would make sense. This is the Elvis muscle, not its proper technical term, but what it does is it's attached to the circular muscle in the mouth area or connective tissue around it, which it pulls up towards the root of the nose into a sort of snow. So you get that upper lip going into like a snarling position like this. And then we have other muscles which pulls down on the mouth, which we consider to be unhappy muscles. Where the muscles are perfectly fine. They express more unhappy type feelings. So they pull the, the mouth down into this kind of snarling thing and you get like wrinkles going at a 90 degree sort of more or less angle to the direction that the muscles are pulling in. And we have some muscles around the nose. And what they do is flare out the nostrils if you need to get more air in there. Another thing they do is compressed the nostrils. So this is the ones down here. The one that goes up into the forehead, pulls down the aisles and kinda creases there, top of the nose like that. So there's a lot of stuff going on here. This is why the face is probably one of the trickiest parts of the body to draw because the muscular action reveals itself more dramatically. Who's down the eyebrows, very light bulb of the nose and any other part of the body. And just for fun, I thought I'd see what laying these muscles over the skull that we were looking up at from that kind of rather back behind angle would look like having said all that. Normally if I'm dealing with expressions, I just find myself pulling the facial expression as, as I'm drawing. And I can kind of feel in my own face was bunching up and I can also look in a mirror. And if you want to search for some reference of different expressions, course you can do that too. So I really don't tend to think too much about these lots of little individual muscles. I'm just thinking, eyebrows down, wrinkly forehead, wrinkles on the top of the nose snarling. And you just look at a lot of people's faces and look at a lot of different expressions and you start to notice the different shapes that you get in the face, the different forms that you have to deal with. Because when you get a different shape happening, it throws up a whole bunch of different forms which the light and shade will react to a very differently. So for instance, if we are dealing with this kind of thing, this is going to be drawn into a very sort of distinct look. And so the so the planes would be much different than if you are doing some kind of snarling action. With the snarling action, you get the thin skin pulled in these other direction. So you'd be more likely to get forms that bit more along those lines. You might end up with something a little bit like that. As opposed to something where the cheekbone is stretching into the mouth area and not being cut up by folds. Creases. Fat also affects surface form and we will get to that in a little while. 13. Mouths (some tips): Let's take a look at mouths. The most important consideration when drawing mouths is this muzzle shape. If this is your chin and this is your nose area. As you teeth. This influences the shape of the mouth because of its sort of semi cylindrical and slightly bulging overall shape. So this would be teeth overlapping. The top teeth tend to overlap the bottom teeth and create this kind of bulge in the middle. So when you're drawing lips and mouth, so you have to bear this in mind. So if we're going to draw ourselves a pair of lips, we have a going round the corner there. And we have a fleshy mass, kind of in the middle of the top lip. And to kind of fleshy masses forming the bottom lip. And we have a bottom lip here. She's wrapping around the other side, so we only see the one corner of the mouth. And those circular muscles that form this kind of whole area around the mouth, including the lips. They kind of overlap in the corners of the mouth. So you get this kind of wrinkled area here with a sort of raised, raised bit would be there on the other side too. This is called the pillars of the mouth, according to George Bridgeman. And we have a depression here and a depression here. So when we get down to the chin, the form kind of goes around like this with a little depression in here between these two lobes and a depression here. So the motet one small. We can have fleshy mass here, to fleshy masses here. And a center line which kind of runs down. And I've got that little convoluted bit there with the pillars of the mouth. And this 40. And there's underneath the nose or outside the edge of the nose. This often a folder borders the outside of these pillars of the, of the mouth. So down there. And it was that when you're drawing an open mouth, if we have a set of lower teeth and that sort of upper teeth will just stretch that mouth down and around. And of course it goes on the other side of these teeth and then back down the side of these teeth. And then we have to give some dimension to all of this. Said, there'll be somewhat more stretched out as a result of being open. But we can still give them that sense of dimension. And then those pillars of the mouth, they're less noticeable the more stretched out they become. But this as some, some lower teeth. So upper teeth inside the mouth. And these are all part of the musculature that forms the lips. In this part of the mouth, circular muscle overlapping here. 14. Noses (some tips): So we already know that a nose is essentially a triangular form, sticks out of the front of the face. But there's a bit more to it than that. If we start with, say, part of a skull. And these are the eye sockets, we have this kind of triangular wedge. The kind of goes back a little way. And sticking out from that you have the nasal bones for a couple of little, little bones. And then the side of the nose. This is the bony part and then we have teeth them. Well, this business. But the nose itself, it kind of gets a little wider as you get to the end of this bony part. And then it's all caught at each beyond there. And so you end up with a wedge that kind of gets a little narrower again. And then it goes down and under and connects on here. And then that kind of feeds into like a fleshy lump, like a blob. On the end. And on the sides you have the the wings of the nostrils. So what you're looking at is a tapering wedge which starts out narrow, gets a little wider, tapers in again, feeds into this fleshy mass, which has attached to its sides to other fleshy masses, which contain the nostrils. So fleshy mass. And this could also have a top edge. And then a plane where you have a more front side, it kind of curves under. Then you have these nostrils. So the overall plane is kind of like this with the nostrils fitting inside of here. And they were very widely, of course, could have some knows is that a very, very narrow with most rules that are kind of very visible. And you can have an upturned nose is nostrils that are lower down. But the front pop usually well, I've never noticed it not be the case. Attaches a little further forward. So if you're looking at your nose from the side, this part, which is the central part, is a little further forward of these wings, of the nostrils. So cis on the kind of upper lip. The middle pop up, side pots down. And we'll go further, further back around. And then this pi here getting quite fleshy. But like I said, there's billions of nodes. Is the row different? So, bear that in mind. 15. Ears (some tips): Is attached to the head. If you're looking from the side and the nose is over here, they attach the head sort of slightly tilted backwards. And if you draw a sort of more or less shape, and then draw another shape occupying about 1 third of the space inside you already most of the way there. This is the fleshy lobe. This is a rim which is running around the outside and then it just kinda blends in about level with this little dip here. And then there's a flap here. And this just kinda disappears down into like a hole there. So if you think of say, if we're looking at the side, front three-quarter overhead. Here's the eye sockets. We picture like a cylinder coming out the side of the head. But it's cutoff a little closer to the face on the front side and further back from the face on the back side. So that then you extend attaching to this. You you flare it out. So you have kind of like a bowl. And that's basically your ear. So there's a hole that goes in there and and a flared rim to like a sort of little cylinder poking out. And then all the cartilage creates these kind of wrinkly contortions. And where you have the lobe, you have a hole here, a flap of skin or cartilage here that kinda protects because the whole goes into your head. So it's protecting you from that. And then this part of the a, a, sort of sticks out a bit presumably to bounce sound waves down into the, into the ear canal. So looked at from sort of Rhea rhea three-quarter view. Like if we're saying the back of the head. Here, you think of the little cylinder coming out and it's cut off. And then it flares out. So since we're seeing the back of it, we would see it would be much flatter in appearance because it is tilted further away on the backside and closer to the head on the front side. So if you're looking at a head from the front that is seemed to stick out wider. And again, they're all different. Some of them are very flat to the head, some of them stick out more. And then this shape here which kind of stick out a little more, which would be this pot, which would also be this pop. And again, that just kinda blends in around here as well. And from the top, say we draw a head. From above. We have a news is we have that little cylinder and the cylinder that pokes out is cut at an angle, so then it flares out in above, below and behind. So that's why we see this is flatter in appearance when viewed from a rear three-quarter and much bigger in appearance when viewed from the front three quarter because we're either looking at it like this or like that. 16. Eyes (some tips): Okay, let's do some eyes. Eyes you can think of as a globe. And if we're looking from the side, the front part is a little more raised. And inside of that, there is the colored part, the iris, and the pupil is the black part here because it's just a hole into darkness. And the iris kind of slips back ever so slightly towards the hole for the bottom of a sink. So the hole itself would be positioned a little to one side because it's sung in. So if this was a flat, round shape on the front of a bowl with a hole in it. You can imagine it might have Rebecca and you just press into it a little bit. So that's what that bit looks like, and that's the colored part. So you could do that blue, say. And this would be the whole and top of the whole thing. You have a little protective kind of contact lens type of a thing if you'd like, which causes it to stick out a little bit. So when we're drawing an eye and it's got an eyelid over the top of it. The eyelid would stick out a little slightly further over the pot with the cornea and the other pods. And so there's thickness to the eyelids. So don't forget about that. So I'll just demonstrate that a little clearer here. If we have the corner of the eye. 17. Fat, aging and some expressions: Let's take a look at the effects of fat on the face. Here is that basic head. Here is some fat distributed in areas where fat tends to accumulate. And what, what tends to happen is generally in life, muscles contract things open, things get squashed and then they bounced back again. And wrinkles that appear just disappear again. But as you get older, you get these little deposits of fat accumulating. And so stuff just has a tendency to, the wrinkles tend to remain at least certain key wrinkles in parts of the face that crease up alone. And so you get a little bit at drooping around the bottom of the jaw and around the eyes and the mouth there. If you get even more fat. That was kind of a smoothing out effect where everything gets a little more inflated. And of course, if you're anything like me, that's about the right time to make sure you've got yourself a nice goatee be said. About the same amount of fat but odor, more sagging, more drooping. So when I'm drawing expressions and when I have been drawing expressions for however many donkey's years I've been doing this. I've kind of learned these muscles and then forgotten them and sort of look back and let them again and forgotten them again. But really when I'm working on in an expression, I just tend to either pull the face myself and feel what it feels like and just draw that. And if that's not getting me there, I might look in a mirror and see what it looks like. Or just find some sort of expression online pretty close to what I'm looking for. It's not one of those things that I tend to try and work out. I just pull a face and work from that. And suggest that you draw yourself a sort of basic head and look up some expressions. I mean, you can just find yourself a bunch of expressions with a search and just apply them to your thing on tracing paper or if you have iPad or some other drawing thing, use layers and just have some fun experimenting with that. And obviously don't forget, sometimes the mouth will be open and sometimes there'll be even more open. 18. Light and Shade: So when you have a pretty good understanding of the planes of the head, it makes imagining shadows from an imagined light source a lot easier to figure out. And what you're seeing here is 14 minutes of putting some lightened shade on the six heads. Now I'm not using any reference. And the reason being, when I'm doing what I do for a living, which is drawing storyboards. I often don't have time to rummage around looking for reference. And it's good to be able to do this kind of stuff. And you will be able to do this kind of stuff once you've got a good understanding of the planes of the head and a reasonable understanding of the effects of light on objects. I'm just those two things will enable you to shade your heads. And usually I don't go this far, just a quick slab or two of shading here and we need to get the job done. So yeah, so start with a drawing of a head with some planes that you understand. And imagine the light source coming from different places and just shade each one differently. 19. Placement onto a neck: Let's take a look at the placement of the head. Heads don't exist in a vacuum that of course, connected to the body. So unless you have an, a particularly bad bay, you can usually find a neck underneath any given the head. So one thing to note is that if we're drawing the ribcage here, that would be where the arms connect, keep it kind of mannequin like. So. The next sticks forward, juts forward somewhat from the top of the rib cage, so it doesn't stick straight up. And quite often it sticks a little further forward than this. But for now we'll just stick with this. So when you're placing your head on a body, rarely will it be like say here's a head and he has a body and he has a neck separated with a space in-between. It would be the case if you are looking from down here. So you would end up with a view that was kind of Here's our, here's a person, here's a neck. And he has a head for that is fatty layer down. And the mouth is. So in that instance, the head and the body clearly separated with the neck connecting them. And likewise, if we're looking down from this direction, what we'd see is a ribcage and that would feed into the neck. We're looking pretty flat on the neck and head tilted back a little way. And we can put on the is put on some moms. So then again, you'd see neck separating head from the body. But if we're looking from anything other than above, from the back, you're going to see something more like we'd be looking up at the ribcage and the back area. The neck would be growing out sort of forward so you wouldn't even see the whole thickness of the neck. And then you've got to hit on top of that, which would sort of disappear behind the shoulders a little bit. So we can put some moms on there. And this these trapezius muscles feed into the, into the back of the neck and attach at the back of the skull. And if we're looking down On a head and torso, we'd be looking at the rib-cage from above somewhat. And this is where the neck would becoming kind of straight at you. So the whole head itself would be right in front of the ribcage. So again, we can put some items on there and put in the rest of it. So placement of the head on the body is a very important consideration. Oftentimes, lightly sketch in your head, draw the body and then redraw the head because it's just a place holder until I've kind of drawn some body to then replace, rearrange the head on top of that. And good practice is when the TV zone and just watch and quickly sketch in how people are sitting and standing and where they're kind of head fits into the general scheme of things. Like when people are kinda. Sitting, leaning forward on a table. The heads pretty often quite low down. So that when you see them from a more kind of frontal point of view, looking across the table at them. If they're home, they're on other arm there. You have a center line here. So the head would be kind of down below the line of the shoulders. So you can put your line of the shoulders in there and put your head in like way down here. And bear it in mind relative to the center line of chest as well. And and the muscle that connects the head to the pit of the neck usually forms a pretty straight line. So you can draw that in. Now. So I always go for that line there when I'm life drawing. Particularly. Say in this instance, if is there, the muscle arises here, just go straight down. So if what the function of that muscle is, is, let's say this is the pit of your neck. So this is your ribcage. It pulls this point behind your ear, which is where it's attached down closer to this set kinda tilt your head away, kind of pulls it down. Say C head would look kinda like that. When this muscle is flexed and there's lucky a little bulge here. So, so keep an eye out for that. And we go to say a reclining person is a very popular pose when you get a life drawing. Say put kind of leaning on your elbow, pit of the neck. And the line of the shoulder here feeding into the neck and the head. And again, you've got that muscle which comes down here. And bear in mind that sort of center line of the front of the ribcage. And the jaw sometimes overlaps this muscle, the sternocleidomastoid muscle, I believe it's cool. And you can think of the neck as a sort of cylindrical form with the head kind of growing out of it. And where you use cylindrical forums. So it's good to balance them out with some sort of squared or forms as well. Just gives it a little bit more dynamism. And then you've got these muscles that come down here and the trapezius on the backside kind of filling out the back side of the neck. So there you have it. Thinking about placement of the head on the body and connecting the two via the neck. So do that watching some TV, make some sketches of people to imposes and sketch the heads on. You can be as loose as you like. I mean, you can just draw an oval over another oval if you want. But just do that because it's good practice. And it gets you used to like seeing where the head is rather than where you instinctively expect it to be, which is usually not in the right place. 20. Rhythm lines (tip): Rhythm lines are another good way to help you work your way into a face. So if we're constructing a face here, go to ascend a line and there's mouth chin. So there's certain lines that you can imagine the kind of go around. So like if you imagine this person sort of wearing a suit of skin tight sort of face, revealing sort of thing or something. And some bulges in the head that you'd like to kind of emphasize. And the circles around the eye area which correspond to the to the skull. And another very good one is coming from above the ear down. And now it can, it can head into the top lip or it can hit down around the bottom of the chin. It's really a sort of personal preference thing. And when you start looking at lots of heads, you start noticing these, these shapes. And you can just, it's almost like the drawing lines on a face. Lines that help you remember what goes where. So like you can have a line like this. And then we have the central line here. You might like to think of a line that runs around here. Whatever helps you, is good. And when you're looking up at it ahead, they kind of sometimes help with those tricky or angles. And you've got the lowest Joel kind of shape slotting into the shape of the cheekbone. And you go to the back of the head. I've been here. Certain shapes in the bottom of the nose. And these, these are things that you'll just kind of started noticing over time with practice. And they just help. So don't be too rigid. If things suggest themselves tea, then by all means, embrace those things and incorporate them into your arsenal of tools to help you better understand and construct ahead. 21. Some Timelapse Doodles: So here's a bunch of doodles which are all from either like a short-term memory or just from having figured stuff out over the years. I like to notice things when I'm watching TV and just take what I've noticed and then try and draw it. And I'd encourage you to do the same. It's more helpful than just copying something because you're having to analyze and make some decisions and then take those away. Have a go at drawing them, see how good or bad your results are. Um, I, I would recommend taking lots of screenshots of say, favorite person from a TV show or movie that you like. And just look through those pictures and then put them away. And then just draw them from a few different viewpoints. And then go back and look at the pictures again. And then you can start noticing parts of the structure that you may have got wrong. You know, maybe the face is a little too wide, maybe it's a little too narrow, maybe the foreheads too big or small, stuff like that. I mean, that's definitely a good way to get better at doing this. And another thing is to really focus on the forms. Don't worry about line quality and sort of style things so much when you're, when you're learning to draw things, just focus on the forms and the structure. That would definitely help you out. And another thing is sometimes you can, after you've been doing this for awhile, you can kind of feel your way into a drawing of a head without going through the rigmarole of building up the structure in the sort of methodical manner. And especially after you've been storyboarding for a while, you just throw a few circles around them, a few dots here and there. And you just figure out the rest of the features based on that. And because you've done it so many times and you're familiar with heads from different viewpoints. You get used to it and it gets easier. And when you find yourself struggling or things are going a bit wrong, which they will, especially when you get into those really sort of weird angles that you just don't really see that much. That's when you can go back, just draw it out on the side, built up with the structural method and then you'll start noticing where you're going wrong. And when you're putting lightened shade on things. And this is all from, you know, like short-term memory or, or just building things up from what you've learned. That's when you're going to find out how well you understand the forms. Because when you put light and shade on them, I mean, that that just reveals them in all their accuracy or, or not. So it's a good way to find out what you need to improve. Making mistakes, making terrible drawings. It's all a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. But picking one or two people that you would like to be able to draw a head that's just like a kind of go to head. Find someone on a TV show that you really like. Take lots of pictures of them in all their different angles and just break them down with tracing paper over the top just to the bare bones structure. She can't recognize them because you're not worrying about features. You just worrying about main shapes, planes. How big is the forehead compared to the between the eyebrows and the nose, for instance, is the chin particularly big or is seeing bigger or smaller than the average? And that way, once you kind of can draw one or two heads that you become familiar with, then recognizing differences in other heads becomes easier. And that's when you can start and just kind of working if you're like say drawing a storyboard, you can just work with a couple of pieces of reference. You got a few people. You don't need to have pictures of them from all angles. You can just tell by looking at like, okay, I know I need to make their face a bit longer and thinner and this one needs to be Gioia and united, so you can just figure it out from that. So have fun and do lots of dueling, but don't do too aimlessly, try and do it or to some kind of plan of improvement. 22. Self Testing: So this is a good way to improve drawing heads. Assemble a collage of someone's head from lots of different angles. In this case, I used a bunch of different angles from fashion thing. So I've blurred them here because I'm not sure the copyright situation is regarding using that kind of thing. And then on a layer, if you're using digital or on a sheet of tracing paper, draw the circles. And the cross on the front of the circle that indicates the direction. That is the combination of the brow line and the midline. Draw that over each head, then remove the collage and then on a new layer, construct heads in the method that we've been doing. And then on another new layer, just add the features, the position of the features. You'll need to find some way of lining up these to your original circles. So maybe put some dots in the corners or something so you can line them back up again. And then on another new layer, draw the outline of the head as you imagine it would be. And so you've basically tried to draw the heads and tried to construct the heads, but without seeing them in front of you. So then just start over, put your collage back, draw the circles and the crosses over the collage and don't take the collage away this time. Just trace over on a new layer at the features where they actually are. And then on another layer, draw the outlines. And then if you just label those so that you don't get muddled up. Which ones were your guessing and which ones were the actual tracing. You can compare your attempt at what you found to be the actual result and see where you're going right and where you're going wrong. And that's the key to improvement, figuring out where you're going wrong. And then you just bear that in mind the next time you try. And then eventually when you've got that head pretty well down, find a very different shaped head and do the same thing again. 23. Class Project: So for our project, you'll be using what you've learned to draw several heads facing in different directions or from your imagination. You can start with some really simple heads and then move on to something a little blockier. And then use Loomis approach with the ball and attaching the doer. And then you could try cylinders and egg shapes and more planar heads. And eventually you can throw a little lightened shade onto the heads that you've drawn. The great thing about posting things to your project as you can keep an eye on your progress. So you could start with really simple heads post those and if you don't like them after awhile or you do some better ones, you can post those as well. And you can leave the opens up or take them down. And you can change the thumbnail image for your project too. So don't feel that what you put up there is written in stone and you can keep changing it and enjoy seeing your evolution. 24. Conclusion: Thanks for taking my class. You can find me around on the web. And if you have any questions, just post them to the discussions in the project. And I'll chime in from time to time. So thanks once again and good luck.