Drawing the Head From All Angles

1. Introduction: Hello everybody. In this course, we are going to learn my method for drawing heads and faces from all angles, from the imagination. This is a method which I stumbled upon while practicing drawing heads myself. And I think it's a pretty good method for beginners because it not only helps us get a fair understanding of the major forms and surfaces of the head. It is also full of useful meaningful exercises which are generally used for, for beginners. Like for example, we are going to practice drawing cubes from all angles. This is a great practice, not only if when it comes to drawing faces, but when it comes to helping us get a feel for volume and orientation. In this course, we take the following approach for each view, which start by drawing these nine cubes to represent the head. Next, we use the cubes to construct the basic forms of the head. And after that, we sketch in the basic features too. After that, we move on by drawing in the clean lines and we color it in with our base colors and we shaded into. As a project, we will use this approach nine times to fill up this grid. We will draw in the front view, the side view, the three-quarters view, the side view looking up and the side view looking down, the front view looking down and the front view looking up. And the very challenging three-quarters view looking down and frequently view looking up. Also included in this course are to reference images. One containing the cubes, all the given angle in isometric, and the other with the cubes rendered in perspective views, these reference images will be indispensable when it comes to getting practice drawing in the cubes. This course is suitable for complete beginners. You can follow the course with pencil and paper, or you can follow the course on digital software. If you follow the course with pencil and paper, make sure you sketch in the cubes, forms and features very lightly so you can easily erase them later. Also when it comes to coloring and shading, you won't be able to follow along with me exactly. Make sure you are familiar with feeding in pencil before you get started. If on the other hand, you are a digital like me, you will be needing a stylus and any digital painting software like Krita or Photoshop. I will be working and Crito myself. You should also be familiar with the basics of your software before starting this course. For example, we will be working a lot with layers. So that's it for the introduction. Looking forward to seeing you in class. See you soon. Bye for now. 2. Front View: Let's start with the easiest. Let's start with the front view. Obviously, the front view is gonna be very simple. In the case of the front view, we just have these five squares. We go back to Krita. We split the canvas into these nine parts. We create a new layer. And we will draw in red the five blocks. You can use a square to if you prefer. But I prefer to eyeball it because it's pretty good practice in general. Beginner's drawing perfect cubes is a pretty good practice because it helps us to eyeball proportions, which is going to be useful all the time when we're painting and sketching. Of course. When we're done, I'm going to use this measuring tool to make sure I got it right. And Krita, you can find a merger tool in the toolbox, doctor, and it looks like this. And in the Tool Options, you can see the distance and the angle which we're measuring. In this case. We can see that I did a reasonably good job. And these distances are pretty close to six pixels, all of them. And these angles are close to 90 degrees, all of them. I'm going to call it good enough. And we're going to go on to the next stage, which is to draw in the basic forms. We're going to use these cubes to help us construct the basic forms of the head. We create a new layer. And on this layer we're going to draw the forms. We start with the sides. Then we just need to do the top of the head. This would be the cranium. If we look at the jaw which see that approximately here would be the lower jaw. If you look at the bone to draw would come down over here. This is where the hinge would be. Somewhere over a would be that hinge jaw would go about 1 third of the way down. This is about 1 third of this square. Then when it comes to the front view as easy to complete the jaw just like this. So remember this is for the skeleton when we're drawing the face, including the flesh. This would be filled up with flesh, muscle and draw the center line. And the brown line. What we've ended up with now is the basic shape of the head. And it actually looks very similar to what we would get with the luminous method. Those of you who know about the Loomis method, you basically already know how to continue. This method is actually quite similar to the Loomis method. Instead of thinking in terms of spheres like the ultimate method and then coming up the sides. We actually think in terms of cubes. And in my opinion, it's much easier to think in terms of cubes, especially for beginners. But the downside is it takes a little bit of extra time to draw in those cubes, but that's okay because we're still learning. We want to take a times with things and make sure we properly understand everything that's going on. But once we get more confidence, I want to understand the face and the head better. We will be able to skip drawing these cubes. And if you prefer, you can draw a sphere instead. And then just like in the Lamaze method, or if we get really good, we can just drawing the center line and then construct the phase from there. Okay, next we're going to sketch in the locations of the major features in blue. Features can be placed quite easily. First of all, let's start with the ear. The ear will be in this over here. When it comes to the browse, we'd have two eyebrows over here. This green is a brow line and the eyes itself would fit in. Somewhere like that. Knows the bottom of the nose would be over here. The mouth would be 1 third of the way down here. What else do we have? We also have the hairline which would be on this line. The sideburns coming down there. Those are basically the features. Next, let's add. The line work. But before we continue with the line work, Let's make these layers which we've added so far, partially transparent. So that will be easier for us to see what we're doing. And that's also a group all these layers, and then select them and resize them and make it nice and big. So this is one of the perks of using digital software, digital painting software, if you're old school and Penn on pen and paper, bad luck. And you won't be able to resize your sketches after you've drawn them. So make sure you draw them nice and big to start off with. It doesn't have to follow these blocks perfectly. Just interpret things a bit. Remember this is red, green, and blue lines is just a guide. And then let's add color layers. I'm going to use a base layer. I'm going to just fill it in. Now we've got the base. I'm going to add another layer called the shading layer. Set it to multiply. Normally, I like to pick a very light blue color and use that as a shading. This is going to be my shading color, the original color. I'm just going to put it in the face layer that I will be able to refer to this scalar again. And then I'm going to go back to my shading layer and I'm going to click on this, which is the alpha inheritance. And if you click on the Alpha inheritance, you don't need to worry about coloring over the edges. Anyway, let's open the blocks, the forms to give us some guide. We can use block and forms to help guide us and help us figure out where the major regions of sharing our. Next, let's put in our light source. I'm going to put it over here, above and to the left of the face and in front of the face. This is supposed to be like a kind of 3-dimensional arrow. It's a cone. And we can see that the cone is pointing into the paper and downwards and to the left. If we were still thinking in terms of cubes, will be lighting up the front surfaces, top surfaces, and the left side surfaces of the cubes. Of course, because it's a front view, we can only see the front faces of the cubes. But because it's a face, it's rounded so we will be able to see some shading obviously. And obviously the features like the nose and the brows custom shading to. Now we sketch in the major regions of shading. We have the front view. That's it. Thanks for watching. See you in the next video where we're going to do the side view. 3. Side View: Okay, hello everybody. Welcome back here we had last video we did front view and it is video. We're gonna do a side view. As usual, we're going to start with sub-blocks. This is the front view, this is the side view. So just as a reminder, nine blocks from the front view, it looks like this. From the side view it looks like this. Let's continue. As usual, we're going to start by drawing the cubes or because we're in the side view, we can see them as squares. I'll just speed up the video a bit so you don't have to sit and watch me draw these boring cubes. Let me just check myself to make sure that I got two proportions more or less, right? And if not, I'm gonna make a correction. We can already see the jaw too big. Remember that's okay if you didn't get the proportions quite right, just make a correction. That's how we learn. That's good enough. The next step is to use these cubes to reconstruct the basic form of the head. I'm going to represent the side of the head as this. Then we've got the cranium top of the head. But we're going to draw the center line of the top of the head, which passes per this point and this point. And it ends up going down to here somewhere. Impact of next, okay, like this. But I think I'm going to make some corrections. I'm going to just narrow it up a little bit. Then we've got the jaw. The jaw line goes about down here. My distance of approximately one part follows this line to buy a distance of approximately one per hand, then we can connect it together. Now we're done with basic forms. Let's add in the features. Right now we're just placing where the features are. We're not going to draw in the future as exactly. We've got ear in this quadrant, if you've got the brown line. So this is where the eyebrows go. Quite easy to remember. Right? Beneath the brown you have this little dip. We've got the bottom of the nose over here. We've got the nostrils here. And you got the tip of the nose. Of course. Some people have big noses, some people have small nose. The lips will be at about one part of the way down. Upper lip, lower lip. And then this dip below the lower lip and the chin sticks out just a little bit, will also be centered on this red line. Then the hairline is over here. We'll be looking at the side of the head, which is practice. You see the side bands over here. Remember that when we place the features, we don't need to follow the forms precisely. We might have made a mistake with the forms. So it's usually better to let your gut feeling guide you. But don't get me wrong. Your gut feeling makes mistakes too. But if you let yourself make mistakes, not only where your gut feeling improve, but also your muscle memory. And so while you are conscious understanding of how to paint and sketch, we need to improve all three of these aspects to help us better. Let's put that I'm transparent. And we're gonna move on with finish line. Go back to coloring. As usual, we start with the base colors. I pick the same base colors as we had in the front view. And I'm going to color in the base colors. First, we're just going to plug up these holes in the line art. And the way I'm going to use the fill to fill it. Now that we've done the base coloring, Let's move on to shading. Let's show the forms, but maybe a bit more transparent. And these forms are gonna help us figure out where to put the shading. Remember the side of the face is flat for if you've got the light coming from the side, it's going to either just catch this edge or it's gonna be just in shadow. So it's either going to look like this. If it's just in shadow, it would just catch the light and the side of the space, this circle will be in the light and the shadow will be behind it. Like this. I think I'll opt for having the side of the face just catching the light. You have the phase from the side view. In fact, maybe just a little bit here too. Thanks for watching. In the next video, we're going to draw the, those from the three-quarters view you in the next video. Bye for now. 4. 3/4 View: Hi everybody. So next we're going to do a three-quarter view from the side. This would be the front view. This is the side view. And then the three-quarters view is right like this. You will see a little angle that's because of perspective, but because you can include perspective, but because we're beginners, let's keep it simple. I'm going to remove the prospective. We see that it's just four rectangles. I think it makes intuitive sense. So let's get started. As usual, we're gonna start by drawing in the blocks. Let me just hide the other layers and put this opacity back to a 100%. I'm just going to temporarily make another temporary layer up here. And I'm going to draw from the top view what we want, so it's still a square. We see that this distance is a bit less than this distance. And this distance will be equivalent to the height, the center line on the middle gonna come down like this. Then these sides will be down over here. This is going to be the front face. Shared it. That's the side. And this now we can further subdivided into the four squares on the side. Foursquare's as well. Now we're going to put in the jaw line two. Let's just put in halfway over here too. It's gonna be halfway, halfway between here and here. Remember, though, these are only guidelines and they don't have to be precise. As you can see, when the cubes are rotated by 45 decrease the width of each cube face appears to be less than the height of the cube phase. This is an example of foreshortening. So in other words, the side that turned away from us gets narrower and narrower the further it turns. We can use math to show that at 45 degrees, the length of that distance, as we see it from the side, would be approximately 71%. It actually will night. In other words, the width of in each rectangle has to be approximately 71% of the height of the rectangle. Who knew maps could actually be useful when it comes to art. Now we know if you're somebody who likes numbers like me, that might be helpful for you just to remember when it's 45 degrees, it looks about 70% shorter than it actually is. If you're somebody who doesn't like numbers, don't worry, you don't need to know all that stuff. You just need to get some practice and you will get rather than intuitive feel for it. Okay, so moving on, SC, I've actually been painting on the wrong layer by mistake. I just have to rearrange these layers quickly a little bit using the selection tool, Control X for cut. And I'm going to merge this layer with the layer it's supposed to be and then move it a bit more to the center. Next we're going to go have a look at the basic forms. Starting with the side of the face, we draw this circle. But since we are looking at it from an angle, the side of the face now appears to be an oval rather than a circle. Again, this is because of foreshortening. As a circle rotates away from us, it appears to get narrower and narrower, but the height stays the same. Next we will draw the top of the cranium. Then we would run the central line of the face. And on the other side of the face. Then we're going to start working on the job. But before we continue on our sketch now would be a good moment to explain a bit more about the job. I'm gonna make another temporary layer. I'm gonna go back to Blender. And I'm just going to take a quick screenshot. John. Follow this front line. And then it will go 1 third of the way. In this way, the back of the jaw is going to be over here approximately, and it's going to follow this line down about 1 third of the way. Then you've got this line connecting the two. That's an approximation of the jaw line in three-dimensional space in real life, it's a bit more complicated than that, of course. Also for reference, let me draw in the front of the jaw. The teeth would be up here. The upper jaw and cheekbones would go something like this. T for the lower jaw and the front of the lower jaw would be over here. Now that we have a better idea of where the jaw bone is placed, let's apply this to our sketch. We start by drawing a line down here, which represents where the back of the jaw meets the ear. And this distance goes about one part of the weight down. And now we've got the front of the chin which follows the bottom line of the bottom cube, which then takes an abrupt right term, which continuous following the bottom line of the cube. From this view, it looks like just a straight line, but in our mind's eye, we know that it's taken an abrupt turn. After that abrupt turn, it goes down again, only 1 third of the way of the cube, more or less. And then we simply join these two lines and that represents the jaw bone. But when it comes to the cheeks, we have to bear in mind that we have a bunch of tissues and muscles hanging over here. Next, one I like to do is I'd like to run the brown line, which is just a center line of this square, this cube. And then have me with the jaw line, with the cheekbones. I just like to draw a line like this and goes down like that and the same on this side. That's the basic forms. Next we're going to draw on the features in blue. Remember this forms are only a guideline at this stage. You have to use your intuition a bit and a bit of trial and error to get the right shapes. In fact, it usually helps if we decrease the opacity of that, we can focus a bit more on the rough sketch of the features. Remember that? There'll be a bit I don't know how to call it. You know, it's just under have a bit of a cavity over here like this, where the eye socket is. When it comes to the nostrils there all the way back here, hugging against this part of the face. Then you've got the mouth. We can use this corner to guide us about where the cheekbones are. Now once we've done the finish line, It's time to add the coloring. Next, it's time for usual. We will use the cubes and the forms to help guide us when it comes to where to put it in a creative place to put the light source just to experiment. Remember if we don't like this, we can easily change it later. This is again, another perk of being digital. If you're on pencil and paper, sorry, but you'd better be more careful than than being right now because it would be much harder to make any kind of corrections to shading. Well, I've certainly looks interesting, but I think I prefer a more conventional approach after row. So let's put the light up here instead and see what happens. So that's it for the three-quarters view. In the next video, we are going to do two in one, we will go back to the side view, but we're going to have the face split it upwards and downwards. Thanks for watching. I'm gonna see you in the next video. Bye for now. 5. Side View Looking Up and Down: Next we're going to draw the side view, looking up and looking down. To save time. I'm just going to copy these layers. I'm going to move them to the other squares in the grid. This is a bit cheating, but I'm doing it just to save time. But if you feel like it, It's pretty good practice. If you want some extra practice drawing the side profile, then in that case it's better to do the exercises instead of cheating like me. The only layer which I didn't copy was the shading layer. Let me just erase the neck. Also erase the lines. When it comes to features. I'm going to select all these layers at once. Make a transform and rotate it by 45 degrees. As you can see, from this rotating base up by 45 degrees is actually quite a lot. Let's redraw the line work. Re-coloring the base. Then let's add in the shading. The shading is a little different, even though, let's say we keep that light source at the same angle, It's a bit different because now the head is looking up. My cheating illustrates drawing the side view looking up is exactly the same as drawing the side view looking head on. There's only some differences in where the shading. We can do the exact same thing for the downwards facing side view. We just copy and merge the appropriate layers. Rotate, then delete the neck, redraw it, then add the shading grooming dam. But remember that now that the basic forms have rotated, the shading is going to lie a bit differently than before. That's it for the side view looking up and down. Thanks for watching. In the next video we're going to go back to the front view and we're gonna do the front view looking down, which is a bit more challenging than the side view you're looking down. I'm just going to finish off over here. You can stay and watch if you like or otherwise, I'll see you in the next video. Bye for now. 6. Front View Looking Down: Okay, Hi everybody. Welcome back. In this video, we're going to have a look at the head from the front view while it's facing down. So we know that words like this. If we put that in orthographic mode like this, to understand and reconstruct these cubes when viewed from the front and rotate downwards. Let's first open this temporary layer and copy and paste the rotated side view over here. Then we're gonna use both the rotated side view and front view to reconstruct this new view, if you are a pen and paper, I'm going to recommend that you redraw this rotate that side view, side view again over here. Make sure that just sketch it in a very light so that you can easily erase it again later. Once I am done with the reconstruction of the front view, we will use the cubes of the front view and the rotated side view to help us reconstruct like cubes for the new view. For the resulting proportions. To make sense though, we need to make sure that the sizes of the squares in both the front and the side views are consistent. In other words, this distance should be equal to distance, distance. Here we have the cranium, let's put in the chat as well. Something like this. You can see it looks a little elongated compared to how it was before. To make things a bit less confusing, I'm going to shade in the lower first. I think I'm going to hide the temporary layer again. I've been coloring on the wrong layer the whole time. Let me just correct that quickly. Let's draw in the basic forms in green. We know the sides are flattened out. The hairline would be something like this. Would be in the front and the back of the head. Be a bit like this. This would be the top of the head very roughly. Let's draw the brown line. So you can think of the face as a kind of cylinder. Since the cylinder is rotated downwards to the surface of the cylinder, at the front of the cylinder forms a kind of U-shaped curve, recessionary later we're going to place the features on the surface. Then when it comes to the ears, if we look at the temporary layer again, you would see that the ears come around somewhere in this square, which corresponds to over here, quite high up. Now let's look at the jaw line. Let's just keep it simple and just connect these lines. Let's draw in the features. Starting with the hairline, the cranium. Let's have a look at the nose. The nose would come out something like here. It would be covering the mouth. Most of them would be behind the nose. When it comes to the browse there over here. And the eyes would appear to be a bit closer to the brows because the browser sticking out. So if we look at the side view, the brows stick out in front of the ice, that the brush would be covering the top part of the apps. And also since the base is rotated downwards, we'd only see the eyelids and we probably wouldn't see any of the white of the eye. You may notice that all these features follow a slight upwards curve. This is because the front of the face is actually like a cylinder. And when you rotate the cylinder, see the curves, it's an unknown. While if we were looking at it head on, it would appear to be more of a flat line. Okay, so that's it for sketching and the features. Let's draw in the line work next. Next we move on to coloring. The final step, we move on to shading. As usual, we keep it simple. Pick a lighting position. I use a cubes and basic forms to sketch and the major regions of shadow and then use the fill tool to fill it up. That's it for the front view looking down. Thanks for watching. I'm just going to do some final touch ups. In the next video, we'll draw the front view looking up you then, Bye for now. 7. Front View Looking Up: Hello everybody. Welcome back. Ready to move on to the next one and the next one we're gonna do the front view again. But instead of looking down like we did last time on the head, it going to be facing up. So it's going to end up something like this. I'm going to take a screenshot of this to help us out. Let's go back to Krita. And let's paste it in a temporary layer somewhere. Let's just move it over here. Let's go to this blocks layer, and let's have a look at the side view because it's going to help us. Once we get more practice, we'll be able to do it by heart without all these aids. Now, because we're still learning, we're going to use all of these aids to help us drawing the blocks. And then use the blocks to help us draw the basic forms. And I'll use a basic forms to help us place the features. Then of course we'll finish it up with lines. There is color and shading color as we usually do. So without further ado, let's move on with blocks. I'm going to speed up this part so you don't have to sit and watch me and reconstruct these cubes. But as usual, I recommend that you pause the video here. Try to construct the cubes yourself. Because it's a pretty good exercise, not only for drawing faces, but in all sorts of situations. To be able to draw a cube from any angle. It's useful for all sorts of things. So pause the video here, practice drawing the cube at this angle. And then I'll see you again in a little bit. By funnel. Literally in the basic forums. We've got the front of the face test is gonna be like a cylinder. Remember? Then it kind of flattens out. Then let's do the chin actually first. Chin. Remember the jaw line, it will go about one part of the way down here. In fact, let me add in the midline over here. If we're thinking about the bones, they will go about one part of the way down here to will look something like this. Outline. Would be around here. Then you'd have the nose because you're looking up. Then we'd have the cranium, something like this. The hairline with barely see it. So it would be much less than this. But we'd have a little bit. Don't worry about the hairline for now. We're gonna do that in the feature. Then the ears would be, if you look at this one for reference, roughly inline with the chin. These two red lines can guide us further placing on the ears, logic and common sense, once you get the basic blocks in that set, to get it right, can be quite tricky. It needs practice. Maybe would draw lines which will help us place the two problems. These lines will help us shape the next features. We have the mouth up here. Let's move on to the line. Finally, we move on to coloring and shading. That's it. Thanks for watching. In the next video, we're going to jump to the next section of the grid and we're going to draw the three-quarters view of the face looking upwards. See you in the next video. Bye for now. 8. 3/4 View Looking Up: Hi there and welcome back. In today's lesson, we'll be doing the three-quarter view. Looking up these last two views are very challenging. So that's why I left them to last, but the basic method is the same. Start with the cubes, then use the cubes to construct a forms. Then sketch in the features, and then the finish lines, the base colors. And last but not least, the shading. Let's start. We're going to draw the three-quarters view, but not facing noun, but facing up like this. This is in perspective view, and this is in upper graphic view. We take a quick screenshot and paste it onto the temporary layer. Drawing deeds blocks in perspective would probably give us a bit better results, but I think let's keep it simple for now. Tp don't know. Perspective basically means that the further away something gets, the smaller it looks. And if you take that into account, It's a bit more realistic or a bit more in line with how we really see things. Which is quite an interesting topic to study. But if you are feeling like, I don't need to know about perspective for now, let's just stick to this view, this isometric view. If you're interested. I've also amongst the course resources, I also have these cubes in perspective instead of isometric. Let me check if I get my proportions right. You can use the ruler or we can move the cubes over the reference to see how well we did. We have to resize it when resizing, remember to hold down Shift to make sure that the aspect ratio stays constant. In general, this is a pretty good practice for beginners because it really gives us a lot of practice in drawing from reference. We don't have to stick to cubes. We can draw anything. We've just drawn the basic forms. And then we'd move it covered original reference drawing. And then we see how well we did. And we can see where we made mistakes. And this way, if we do it often enough, we will assume be able to reliably reproduce the basic forms from a picture from reference. In this case, I didn't do perfectly, but I think I did well enough that we can continue with the next step on the drawing, which is to construct the basic forms. Okay, let's construct the basic forms. We'll start off with the side of the face, which is a circle, which is defined by this square. Next, let's move to the other side of the face tool. And let's draw the center line to the back of the head is a bit tricky. But essentially we'd be seeing the center line coming down and joining the base of the neck over here. Brown line, jaw line. That's basically it for the forms. I'm just gonna do a couple of touch ups. Let's add in the major features, the position of the major features next. That's it for features. Let's move on. We've finished lines. Finally, moving on with coloring and shading. There we have it. This is quite a challenging angle to draw the head at. And we did it all basically from the imagination. We only needed reference images to draw in the cubes. But as we practiced drawing cubes in more and more, we won't need those reference images anymore. In the next video we have another challenging one, the three-quarters view but facing downwards. So I'll see you in the next video. Bye for now. 9. 3/4 View Looking Down: Congratulations, You made it to the very last video. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed the course so far and I hope you learned a lot. If you did like the course, why not help me out and write a review? And you could also upload a project that'll give the other students an idea of what they would get out of this course. That also gives me an opportunity to find out what you got out of the course. And of course in this way, I'd also be able to give you some constructive feedback anyway without further delay. Let's move on with the final view, the three-quarters view facing down. As usual, we start with the blocks, and it's best to draw them from reference because it's quite hard to draw them from the head at this angle. You might want to consider including perspective, but there's no hurry learning about perspective. So I, for one, I'm going to keep it nice and simple. Keep it in orthographic view. In this case, give me a little extra help constructing the forms. I'm also going to drawing the other side of the cubes, but in dotted lines. Next we add in the basic forms. We start with the center line, which starts all the way back here and moves through this point, goes down proof that point, and goes through the middle of the chin. Let's draw in the side circuit. And on the other side as well. The top and the back of the head. And of course the brow line, the chin. Now that we're done with the basic forms, Let's move on to adding in the features. Before I continue, I'm just going to make these layers are more transparent so I can see the feature layer a bit better. Let's add in the line work. Remember we don't have to follow this precisely. In this case, my gut feeling is telling me that we somehow ended up with the forehead being significantly too big. So I'm going to follow my gut and I'm going to make it a bit smaller when it comes to the finished lines. I'm going to call it good enough like this. And now I'm going to color it in. Now we have it. It's not perfect, but it's not bad, especially considering that we did the whole thing from the imagination. If you want to do it really well, then it's a good idea to practice from reference. Now that we have some better understanding of basic forms and the basic orientation of the head. Combining it with drawing pictures from reference would improve our ability to draw the head at these angles lot. So that's all for this course. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you found it useful. If you did please leave a review and leave some feedback, and also it would help the course out a lot if you uploaded the project and if you put some things in this course could be better, please let me know in the feedback and that way I will be able to make better courses in the future. That's all from me. I have a good one.