How To Draw Dynamic Heads & Faces In Perspective: Drawing Downward & Upward Angles | Clayton Barton | Skillshare
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How To Draw Dynamic Heads & Faces In Perspective: Drawing Downward & Upward Angles

teacher avatar Clayton Barton, Harness the Power of Dynamic Drawing

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Dynamic Heads Introduction

      1:04

    • 2.

      Top Down Front View

      35:08

    • 3.

      Top Down Three Quarter View

      35:38

    • 4.

      Bottom Up Front View

      44:43

    • 5.

      Bottom Up Three Quarter View

      30:46

    • 6.

      Head Perspective Exercise

      4:26

    • 7.

      Dynamic Heads Assignment

      1:02

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About This Class

Learn How To Draw The Head & Face on Any Angle

Do you want to make your head drawings pop off the page with new levels of depth and dimension? Would you like them to appear more '3D'?

Then you're in the right class.

You're about to discover how to turn the head in space, and draw it from multiple points of view - in perspective. I'm going to take you through the entire process, step by step. So get your pencil and paper ready - and lets draw some dynamic heads!

Today you'll learn how to draw:

  • The Top Down Front View
  • The Top Down Three Quarter View
  • The Bottom Up Front View
  • The Bottom Up Three Quarter View

Of the head.

By the end of this class, you'll know how to draw heads & faces in perspective, on multiple downward & upward angles - after going through just two hours worth of content, that'll walk you through the step by step process for each view, with real time demonstrations.

This class is for comic artists, fine artists, illustrators and concepts artists who want to gain a better understanding of presenting the head in perspective, from multiple angles.

If that's you, then let's get started!

Meet Your Teacher

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Clayton Barton

Harness the Power of Dynamic Drawing

Teacher

Often I’m asked how long I’ve been drawing. The truth is I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t. I was like any other crayon wielding kid, the only difference being that I never let go of that yearning for artistic venture.

I still remember the walls being filled top to bottom with the felt tip scrawling’s of an artistically fiery five year old. Maths books filled with cartoons instead of numeracy, English books littered with more pictures then poetry. It went on and on and it never stopped.

My first love was Comic Books, my second was Video Games. Realizing that I wanted to build a career in both I spent most of my late teens immersing myself in constant study, practice and improvement to harness my skills in multiple fields. It was a ... See full profile

Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Dynamic Heads Introduction: Hey, it's Clayton. In this class, you're going to be learning about how to draw dynamic heads from a range of different angles, including the top-down, Top-down, three-quarter, bottom up, and bottom ups, three-quarter perspective. We are going to discuss construction when drawing the head on these angles. And also delve deeper into the ways in which the proportions of the head shift and morph according to the perspective that we are drawing it on. A lot of different things end up happening in terms of the way in which we visually represent the head when we begin to turn it in space. And throughout this series of lessons, what I intend to do for you is to take away some of the mystery as to exactly what those things are so that you can feel comfortable and confident drawing the head in these more difficult representations. Let's get straight into it. 2. Top Down Front View: This will be the top-down front view of the head. Probably one of the easiest ones that we'll be drawing up today. So we're going to start this out in pretty much the same way we would start out the regular front view. This time we're going to be looking down on top of it. However, we're still starting out with a sphere. And we're using that sphere due to determine the positioning and the size of the head on the page. But keeping it light and wispy, kind of rough. We've got a very sharp pencil. If you're working digitally, you've got a very small pencil brush, a pinpoint that you're working with. Basically. We're going to lay in the axes, running it through the top and at the bottom. We'll draw in the horizontal equator guideline. That'll run around the belly of the sphere. And because we are drawing the head from the front view here, even though we're looking down on top of it, we're still going to want to try to make it as symmetrical on either side as possible. So these guidelines that we've laid in so far around the sphere, I mean, there's really only one of them besides the axes that's determining the direction that the head is looking in already. Okay, So by step like number two or three, we figured out what direction the head is going to be looking in. So use these guidelines to establish the direction that your head is going to be looking in from the get-go from the beginning, Laying the center line. Now, it's going to run from the top of the sphere to the bottom. Then we'll chop off the sides of it. Now, because we are going to be looking down on top of the head here. There's gonna be some foreshortening that occurs. That foreshortening is going to cause the head to narrow itself toward the bottom. Given that, as I cut off the sides, the side planes of my sphere, I'm going to somewhat describe those side planes to represent and describe that foreshortening That's going to be happening. Let me show you, because it's going to be much easier to show you what I mean by that. As I lay in this curve here, where I'm going to flatten out the side planes. You'll notice that it's somewhat following the same trajectory as that angle I just placed in. Okay, so rather than having the side plane division run straight up and down, the sphere of actually placed at E in, on an angle here. So that when I flatten it out, it's going to have that foreshortening, that perspective built into it. The more I'm looking down on top of the head, the more dramatic that angle is going to be. It will do the same thing on this side. Now, what degree of angle should it be according to the view that I'm looking at the head on. There's, there's no mathematics that you really need to do for. It's just about using your eye and your best judgment. And your best judgment will get more and more accurate and better and better as you practice. Because what practice does is it helps you to work out what's going well, what's not going well. So it's as much about getting better as it is ironing out the, the bad aspects of your art that you're not liking, that isn't leading to the result that you're looking for. Now one thing that helps me to capture symmetry sometimes is by looking at the amount of space I've got on this side as opposed to this side. And so sometimes that's what I'm judging in order to decide how much I need to cut off of the sides of my sphere. I've talked about that before, but it's worth just. As a reminder to mention it. Then I'm going to erase away the sides of my sphere there. And you can see we've already got, I mean, we've essentially got a narrowing cranium. Cranium that's smaller toward the bottom than it is the top, which is the effect that we're looking for here. Without top-down down representation of the front of the head. Okay, next up we're going to drop the front of the face. Now. It's not just going to be the facial features themselves that are foreshortened. It's also going to be the face as well. And so we want to try to keep that in mind, knowing that the length from the brow to the chin is in fact going to be shorter in this view than it would be in the standard front view. Because of course the chin is getting further away from us. So what I'm going to do is sit at about here. So that's where the base of the chin is going to be. Actually, let's sit it a little bit lower. You'll like it could be lower. And as I lay in the length of the face, I'm trying to really think about the basic forms that I'm dealing with. I'm trying to visualize it on the page, those block formations that we went over initially. Now because we're looking at the head from above, the width of the chin is going to be shorter. Then as we lay in the jaw line, a few interesting changes that ends up occurring here. The corners of the jaw are going to raise the bottom edge of the jaw. It elongates down toward the chin. Okay. So there's a greater amount of space in this second edge below the corners of the jaw that's going to be applied. Okay, So remember that the bottom portion of the jaw elongates down towards the chin. The angle is also going to be pushed. Okay. So it's going to be narrowed. Okay. So the corners of the jaw are actually going to be narrower in terms of their placement and their width in comparison to one another. As opposed to the bottom-up view where we would see the opposite effect occur, where they would actually widen. This is what makes drawing heads on dynamic angles so difficult, is to start with, you've got a fairly complex organic form already. And then trying to force shorten and then present that in different angles is it's difficult to get your head around, no pun intended, but that's why we try to think about it in the most simplest terms possible to make it easier to perceive, to make it easier to think about and to comprehend. Now these changes might appear on the page when we apply them. So we've got the jaw line. Big it out there. Remember? Okay, I want to, I want to reiterate this to you. The key changes we're going to see when we're looking down on the head are an extension of this area here. The edge between the corner of the jaw and the chin. It's also going to narrow out. And then we're also going to see a smaller distance between the corners of the jaw. As it tapers further inward. The jaw basically becomes smaller and pointier. It becomes triangular rather than square, which it would become if we were looking at it from below. And one way that you can think about this is if this is the jaw from the front view. Well actually, let's say that this is the jaw from the front view. Just going to draw something simple here. Let's say that that's the bottom of the jaw from the front view. Well, as we look down on it, what's going to happen is this extension is going to occur. Right? And as we lift the head up, we see the opposite effect. We see a shallowing of the shape of the jaw. And eventually the head looks up far enough. We're going to see an inverted representation of the jaw. Now it's instead pointing upward. This is the way in which I think about it. So you can think of that as the jaw line. Next, we'll go ahead and we'll divide the distance between the brow and the chin in half. So we're dividing this distance in half. Now keep in mind that half here, it's not going to be there, right? Even though that would actually technically probably be half. But now we need to foreshortening. Okay, so where would the halfway point B if we were to apply for shortening to that distance, well, it'll be sitting at a little lower. It'd be sitting about here. So that's about where the noise is going to be. And then we divide the distance between the noise line and the chin into thirds. Those thirds aren't going to be equal though, as they appear to us, they going to be foreshortened. And so the first third will have the greatest amount of space, while the bottom two-thirds are going to have an increasingly smaller amount of space. So again, they skate, they're scaling away from us. They're getting smaller. As we get toward the bottom of the chin. Next up, we've got the eyes. Now, what we need to remember is that the eyes are going to sit at the halfway point between the top of the head, which would be about here, and the bottom of the chin. Where would that be if we were to apply foreshortening to that halfway point? Well, I would say it'd be about here. Be about where the eyes are going to sit. Lay in a line, a very light line across there. And we'll just keep it straight because really the eyes are going to sit on a flat plane. The front, the front plane of the face, which is fairly flat actually. Alright, cool. So we've got the eye is placed in, the brow, is going to sit up here. Actually sitting quite close to the eyeline. We've already established where the brow is going to be. I'm just going to draw it in here so it's a little clearer. Then we've also got the positioning of the ears. Now you'll notice that they're going to be sitting fairly high up. So they're going to be around about here, even though they would usually align the bottom of the ear, we usually align with the nose line. What we wanna do is draw a line up following the curve of the sphere in order to figure out where those ear position positions are going to reside. So always remember that is, they sit higher on the head when we're looking at it from above. The higher we are, the higher the ears are going to be on the head. Wonderful. Next up, let's lay in those head planes. I like laying in the head planes because they give us a basic three-dimensional look at what the geometry of the head consists of. Quickly lay those in. Now we've got, we've got a basic head structure ready to roll. Laying the hairline here is going to run from the top of our flattened out side planes into the middle of the cranium. And you can see that we've actually be pulled down following the curve of the sphere. So we've got a fairly well-structured foreshortened head happening here. Now we might go and tweak the shape just a bit to fine tune it to make sure it's the way that we want it to be. It's the way that we wanted to look. And we can just go over the top of the darker line. Remember, always keep your initial lines very, very light so that you can do that. So you can just go over the top later on, unfixed things up if needed, or polish and refine what you've already got there. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. Finally, I'll I'll add in the neck. And we'll just keep the neck very simple here. Doesn't have to be anything fancy. The trapezius muscles on either side of the neck. Wonderful. So that is the basic construction of the top-down view of the head. Next up, let's lay in the facial features. Move this down a little bit. Actually. We could even make it a bit bigger. There we go. Okay, so facial features, but start with the eyes. Going to loosely draw these in to begin with. Now, the eyes, in terms of their most simplest shape, you can think of them as like this from the top down front view. Angry. It's basically an angry I and k. So you're going to have this flattened out portion along the top. And then you're going to have the bottom of the eye running along the bottom open. The bottom edge is the opening like so. That's what I'm thinking about as I'm drawing in these IS here on a very simple level anyway. So again, we've got the top here. We've got the opening of the eye and going to run right back up into the top here. And the reason for that is because this bottom eyelid, which we can see a quite a lot of is wrapping around the eyeball shape itself. Same on the opposite side. Rather than using a curved line to describe the shape of the eye. Try to keep them shape and sorry, sharpened energetic. So I'm gonna do that on both sides. Actually. I kept this one a little bit too curved. Curved lines tend to come out a little bit more meek. And you don't want make your drawings. You want them nice and energetic. Nice and sharp and vivid. Got the I is there. Let's roughly sketching the eyelashes. The basic shape for those eyelashes. But a set running around the sides of the eye. A set running along the bottom and a set running along the top as well. Alright. We'll do the same thing on the opposite side here. Keep in mind the size, the size of the eyes as well. Roughly speaking, the width of the head overall should be bad hot five widths apart. The distance between HIS should be one eye width. Minor, probably sitting a little too far apart here. Actually, I'm just going to cheat here and I'm going to move them over just a tiny bit. Sometimes, you know, eyes, they can just be a little bit off. You're doing this traditionally, of course, erase it and do it again if you need to. Yeah, that's sometimes a problem I end up with. Everyone has their own repetitive issues that crop up within their drawings that you usually need to be addressed or at least need to keep an eye on them. All right, Next, we will allay in the eyebrows. And as I said before, they're going to be sitting right on top of the eye here. We'll draw in our basic eyebrow shape. As I've said before, if you have trouble drawing the eyebrow shape, practice that for like a day. And I can tell you you're not gonna have any problems with the eyebrow shape after that. I mean, just focus on drawing the eyebrow shape. It's about tackling it one component at a time. And you might not be a pro at drawing. I'm drawing the entire head, but you'll certainly be approached drawing eyebrows. If you're focused on it for awhile. Eventually, you pull it all together and before you know it, you're capable of drawing the entire head with ease. I wouldn't ever say that they're drawing the head is easy. It's always going to have its challenges, but it would get easier with time and practice. We'll draw an hour eyebrow. There's rendering them out. Mixing up the distance and the space which those eyebrow hairs are placed to give them a nice organic look. And then we'll lay in the iris and pupil. So people in IRAs are going to be sitting closer to the eye. Here are the top of the eye, especially if they're, if we're looking down on it from above and that head is looking at us. Okay. So the pupil is going to be sitting directly underneath that top eyelid. Would draw in a little bit of a reflection happening. I'm gonna do is the same thing in the opposite high, sitting the pupil. And also iris right up against the bottom of that top eyelid. Alright. Next up, we'll draw in the nose. Now we're not going to place in the entire bridges and those are only going to suggest that a little bit at the top there. We might even add in some subtle folds, some subtle creases around the middle of the brown, just to describe some of the muscles that are within that area. But let's lay in the nose now. We know that the nose is basically like a block. We were looking at it directly from the front. It looks something like this. Okay. But then when we're looking above it, what ends up happening is that we don't see this underside plane anymore. Instead, what we end up seeing represented with the blockier is an inverted representation that hides that underside plane. So in a sense, you could think of the underside, nose plane as the underside and jaw plane because the same effects essentially end up happening. Alright, and so what does that mean? Well, if your nose is going to be placed here, it means that It's going to extend beyond it. So it's going to pull down further toward the mouth. Of course, I want to be careful here. We don't want to pull it down too far. Otherwise, it'll make it look as though a character's nose is much longer than it should be. I'm only going to pull it down a little bit and I'm going to keep the shape fairly simple to begin with at least. And that's, that's all you really need. Just something that looks like that. We'll go around the lightly drawn in basic shape that we place down to define its positioning. And tweak it, refine it, make it look more like a nose. Indicate the top of the nostrils there if we want to as well. And that's about it. Okay. So now it looks like looking down on top of the noise. Again, you can indicate the nose bridge if you want to. It's a stylistic choice. I like to keep it fairly light and not completely defined. Once again, try to get your nose centered in the middle of the face. Mine probably isn't all that centered. Being honest. Right? Next up we've got the mouth now. Once again, because we're looking down on the mouth here, rather than it being straight across from one side to the other, There's going to be a downward bend in it. Okay. So with that in mind, I'll go ahead here and start with the middle of the mouth. Pulled out the opening. Up toward the corners, which will sit up here. Now remember that the width of the mouth is going to be positioned, or the corners of the mouth will be positioned in the middle of the eyes on either side. So what we need to keep in mind here is that not only does the positioning on the vertical axis of the facial features shift according to the perspective, but also their width is affected. Okay, so if we take the middle of the eye here and we apply it in perspective as we bring that width down the corners of the mouth. Well, they're going to sit a little more inward. So the mouth will actually be narrower than it would otherwise appear if we were looking at the head directly from the front. So again, another important thing to keep in mind, they're laying the top lip here if we're able to see it at all. Because that the top plane of the lip is going to be hidden more on this position. Then we've got the bottom lip here. We can see more of it though. We'll define its outline ever so slightly. And I'll darken up the outline to define it further. The corners of the mouth, of course, which we can bring down just a bit like so. And then we've also got a little bit of rendering that's going to happen underneath the mouth. That bottom, underside plane that leads into the chin, the top of the chin. And that just about does our main facial features that sit on the front plane of the head. Next up, we have got the ears. We're going to be looking more on top of the ears, of course, since we're observing the head from above. I'll start with the outline of the ear. And then I'll draw in the inner frame of the ear, the top. And I'm going to try to present it as though it's really curling in there to the ear. Alright, We'll leave that down to the ear opening. Placing the ear Hall. And I'm even going to I'm going to pull this inner cartilage out just a little bit further to describe the anatomy there correctly. The little indentation in there at the top. Wonderful. We'll do the same thing on the opposite side of the head. Outlining the shape of the ear first. Boring in the inner frame. Pulling out the inner cartilage. Leading that down into the ear lobe. Then completing the opening to cover the hall, thus completing the ear anatomy. Now what I'll do, since our facial features are pretty much sorted, is I'm going to go back around the outside of the face and define the jaw to set a little bit more. Really tried to perfect its shape a bit. And all that requires is just darkening up the outline over the top of that lighter draft roaring that we started out with. I'll go back around the top of the head here. I'll erase these off cuts. Tightening the drawing up just a bit. Then we'll round out the top. All right, find that even for professional artists, it's actually tough to get this rounded bit at the top of the skull. To be completely symmetrical. Not everybody has an easy time doing it. It takes a bit of tweaking, little bit of sketching in order to get it right. So just take your time to capture a nice shape for it. I think that's a lot of the time. What this is, especially in the beginning is just taking the time to get it right, even though it is seemingly insignificant aspects of roaring the head. Okay, cool. And now let's define the neck a bit more and we can call this head example done. We'll keep the next simple. It doesn't need a whole lot of anatomy defined in it today. It's not the main focus. What we can also add in is maybe a little bit of indication of anatomy around the eye socket area. I guess, the sidewalls of the nose which kind of join onto the eye sockets. Usually I'll just indicate that with a line, maybe a doubled up line, it doesn't need a whole lot. We can also placed in a line for the fold of the bottom eyelid against the eye socket. And that just about does it. There we have it going to erase these guidelines here ends. That's the front top down view of the head completed. 3. Top Down Three Quarter View: Okay, So this is where things are gonna get really tricky, because now we're turning their head on more than one axis. Not only are we turning it up and down, we're also turning it side to side. But nonetheless, I'll start out very simple with the sphere. Lightly drawing it in. I'm going to try to make it a sphere which is roughly the same size as the sphere of the previous head. So again, the sphere is always going to help you to figure out what size the head should be. The easiest way of establishing the size of your head from the get-go. And then we have got the axes. Now, this is quite a dynamic view of the head, a common dynamic view in fact, so that axis is going to become quite important. What I was doing a bottom-up, you just then when what I want is a top-down view. So I'll put the axis through the top here. The head will be on a slight tilt. Poke it out the bottom like an olive wanted to speak. Then we'll lay in that horizontal equator line. They'll run around the sphere. And I am drawing this in very, very lightly. Hopefully you can see it. But the reason as to why I'm keeping it light as always, is to allow myself the room to make all those all important tweaks later. Because I know that they're going to come up. I know that it's rarely ever smooth sailing or become accustomed to that. The trauma of drawing has made me used to accepting the fact that it's just not going to be perfect, that there's always going to be things that need to be fixed and tweaked even at this early stage. As I'm, as I'm fixing up the the horizontal guideline here, you can see me tweak that. I'm pulling out the eraser a little bit here and there. I'm sketching it, sculpting it, trying to get it the way that I want it to be. And you can noodle away at that stuff or much longer than needed a lot of the time. In fact, this is a very neat foundational drawing that I'm laying there on the head. Usually I would keep it much much rougher than this. Why? Because I know that it doesn't matter how it is. All that matters is that final presentation. Okay. So where do I want the head to be looking in? Well, I want it to be looking in this direction. So you know what I'm going to start with? I'm going to start with a little cross that intersects the vertical line, that intersects this horizontal guideline. And then I'm going to pull that up around the rest of the sphere. So that's, that's an easy way of just nailing exactly what direction you want the head to be looking in and where the center line for the face will be. As a result. You'll notice that these guidelines, they follow the curve of the sphere as we draw them out. That's what in fact describes the sphere is a sphere instead of a flat two-dimensional circle. Next, I'll chop off the side planes. I'm keeping in mind how much space is on this far side of the head as opposed to the side of the head that's closest to us. In order to figure out how far toward the front, that side place should come. That side plane should come rather. I'm getting a drawn in there. You'll notice that side plane is squashed somewhat due to the foreshortening that's applied to weight. Everything has foreshortening applied to it. Next I'm going to draw a center line for the side plane. And that center line will travel on an angle. Also lay in the front of the face, which is going to run all the way down to the chin. And it's important that I fully the axes that I initially established the head in order to make sure I've got the trajectory of the face laid incorrectly. So that's going to run down to the chin. And I know because I'm looking down onto the head that The length of the face is going to be shorter than it otherwise would be if I was looking at it on an IR level. Now the jaw line now this is the tricky part. We're going to again taper that. In other words, we're pushing its angle, we're making it more triangular in an otherwise would be as it's pinched toward the bottom of the face. And remember that the bottom of the jaw is elongated. So this edge I'm drawing in right now, it's going to appear longer. The k n on the opposite side of the face. I'm just going to loosely draw that in in a straight line that runs from the side of the sphere all the way down to the chin. And we'll talk about how we shape that out in more detail in just a moment. Be mindful of the angle of the jaw here, it might require some tweaking in order to get it right. Develop an artistic IF of this stuff. A critical eye probably is more accurate. That allows you to be able to see and judge whether or not the angle of the jaw, for example, is correct. It may not be. You may need to push it, pull it, squash it, stretch it in different ways in order to get it to look right. I'm going to draw a little cross over the top of the head just to mark where that is. Now it's time to plot out where the facial features are going to sit along the length of the face. I remember just as before. We're going to figure out the midway point between the brow line and the chin. And that's going to be, and wherever that is, there'll be where we place our nose. So between this point and this point, where would the midway point B with foreshortening applied to it? I'm going to estimate that it it'd be about here. Okay. So there's a greater amount of space in the top half than there is in the bottom half, of course. But that's only because of foreshortening if we were looking at an eye on an eye level, that positioning for the nose would be sitting exactly halfway between the brow line and the chin. Alright, let's divide the bottom distance. The noise and the chin into thirds. Top third is going to have the most amount of space. To bottom thirds are going to have an increasingly smaller amount of space. There to be where the mouth sits in the top of the chin will be. Next. We need to place it now. Eyeline. Eyeline is going to sit just underneath the brown line. It's gonna be very, very close to it. And it'll sort of run around the front of the face, following the curve of the sphere just a tiny bit, but it will mostly be straight. Sometimes you've got to straighten up the eyebrows as well. And you'll also notice that the top of the head here, it looks kinda to round. And the skull isn't a perfect spherical dome. It's actually flattened out on top a little bit. If you look at an actual skull, especially from the side, you'll see that it's flattened out on top. So what I like to do, as I like to grab my pencil here and flatten out the top of it like so. And I guess that's what would happen if I actually decided to chop off the other side of it like I was supposed to. But you flatten it out on top and will sculpt that out further and further. But for now it's worth just noting that you don't always need to leave it and you shouldn't always leave it as a perfect spherical curve on top of the skull. You want to shape it to something that resembles a more of an accurate, realistic skull. Okay, great. And keep in mind of course, that most of the time your characters are going to have some kinda cool hairdos sitting on top of their head. Will definitely talk about in a later lesson. But just in terms of knowing what's going on underneath all that, he'd been mined the skull shape. Okay, Wonderful. Now let's place in the facial features themselves. Now that we know where they're positioning is going to be. I'll also draw in the years. Before we do that. I guess the years are a facial feature. So we'll start with those. Now raised up. And I've simply followed the positioning of the nose in a curved fashion up into the bottom of the ear, which aligns with it. And the top of the year, of course, aligns with the top of the brown. Follow that curve. It's not going to be down here. Curve upward around the side of the head. Okay, Wonderful. Now let's draw in the eyes. Okay, So from this point of view, what is the basic shape of the eye? Well, it's essentially something that looks like this. And if you want to get more complicated than that, I'll lay in the front of the eye or the inner corner of the eye. I'll lay in the top and then I'll lay in the bottom. Bottom edge is going to come all the way up at the tear duct and then drop all the way down in the middle. They come back up and create the outer edge of the eye or meet the outer edge of the IRS and say, okay, so that's the basic shape, at least on the side of the face that's closest to us. On the side of the face is further away. The I is going to well, it's going to follow a similar shape. It'll just look a little bit different. Okay, so let's, it's very, very basic form. Think of it as like a triangle. On a more complex level. It looks a little bit more like this. You're going to see the brow layered on top of it closer. Little bit more on that far side. Okay. Probably give those facial planes drawn in verse before I start to lay in the facial features. Now, the other thing that I'll mention here before we get into the facial features, actually skipping ahead here a little bit with the eyes, but I just wanted to talk for a moment about the far side of the face in how we describe that. Because it can be difficult, especially in this more three-quarter view. There's 23 things that I like to keep in mind. That is, let me get my red pen out here. That is the cheekbone. Okay. Now, if I, if I take my head plane down here, this cheekbone is going to drop down just a little bit in the final artwork. So we've got the cheekbone and then we've got the mouth muscle that sits around this area. Then we've got the chin. Okay, so it's this form here and this form that joins together which creates this cape on the side, the far side of the face as it turns away from us. Sometimes we'll see the side of the jaw, the opposite side of the jaw peeking out there? Sometimes we won't. It depends on how far the head is turned away from us, but that's something to keep in mind. Hopefully, that clears up some of the confusion as well. So again, I'll draw it up here. We've got the brow, we've got the top of the cheekbone. The bottom of the cheekbone, which leads into the mouth muscle, which will then lead into the chin. Sometimes you will see the opposite side of the jaw peeking through there. Sometimes there'll be completely obscured. But that's what I'm thinking about when it comes to drawing in the far side of the face accurately in a three-quarter view, whether it'd be the three-quarter view, looking down on all the three-quarter view, looking up at it. Going to go ahead here, enjoying my hairline as well. Okay, Cool. Facial features. Let's get those late in there. We've got the eye, which I'm going to roughly draw in on either side. Okay, there we go. We'll draw in the eyebrows on top of that. On either side of the head. Going for that simplified eyebrow shape to begin with. I'm not quite happy with how the eyes are looking, actually some just going to tweak them someone. Every angle of the head can have its own set of difficulties. Okay. I think there might be looking a bit better. Now I'll attend to this side. There we go. Next, we're placing the eyelashes. Now you're going to see the bottom set of eyelashes just a little bit more than you will see the top set. Because you can think of the eyelashes as planes. Essentially, that top plane is just going to always be hidden more when we're looking at the head from above, just like the top lip. And there we go. Again, I'm still not liking the way that eye is looking, so I'm just gonna get rid of it completely. Sometimes if something's not working, you just got to restart it from the beginning. I think the reason it wasn't working is because I wasn't quite getting that angle right at the top of the eye. Okay. I think I like that better. So a lay back in those eyelashes. The bottom of the eye and around the top. And a lot of what makes the face work from these different angles is really nailing the shape of the facial features and the shape of the face itself. It's all about shape. That's looking way better. I'll outline the brow. Get a good shape going for it. And do that on both sides. Then start laying in the brown texture. Keeping those brows strands are very distance apart from one another. And thinking about the comb of the eyebrows as well. So what direction is that here traveling in? What direction do I want it to be traveling in? Keep in mind, these eyebrows aren't realistic in any way, but they look good stylistically. They work stylistically. It's not about what capturing, what's accurate. It's about the design of your art, especially in comic book illustration. How will you design the facial features and facial shape of your characters? What will make them unique and interesting, uniquely yours? I guess that's what they call style, is the way you design those things. Next up, we'll place in the iris and the pupil. And now the nose. The nose is an interesting one. Remember that the nerves, it protrudes off of the face like a block. So if we were to draw it in roughly here, that's kinda the idea that we go on with. So this would be about where the base of the nose would go. So I'm going to draw a little line out like so. And then I'll start drawing out the bridge of the nose from the brow, pulling it down and then back in. So it's important to describe the three-dimensional representation of the nose properly, especially in views like this. I'm not sure the angle of the nose was quiet, correct? This I'm going to have another go at it. Again, these trickier angles are going to have more errors in them. Inevitably. Even the best artists are going to have to rejig their heads from time to time when drawing them from these more difficult angles. So if you've gotta do it as well, that's totally okay. You can see I'm making plenty of tweaks and plenty of fixes to the head that I'm drawing here especially. And some days I can draw it better than others. Most times I don't have a problem with it. But then you get that odd day where you just one reason or another, it's not quite coming out the way that you want it to follow the structure. And then along the way you're following the path. Does it gonna be obstacles every now and then? You'll just need to do what you need to do in order to get past them, in order to conquer them. Hey, that's looking a bit better. Sculpting out this nose shape I want to give, I like to give my characters nice-looking facial features that look accurate, as accurate as I can get them. I think this is looking okay. So now what I'll do is placed down the mouth, starting with the middle of the mouth, drawing out the opening from the middle into the corners. And remember that they're going to align with the middle point of the eye. We've got those drawn in. Then we'll draw in the bottom lip, place in a little bit of rendering underneath it. And you'll notice that this doesn't leave much room for the chin. So I'm going to extend that down just a bit more as well. So I'll probably take the chin down to about here. In fact, once more, it deviates from the initial foundation that we laid down in the beginning. But so be it. That's totally fine. I'm not going to stick to the foundations if it's not going to lead me to the best possible final presentation. Okay, so next up, let's talk about how we're going to define the far side of the face and the shape that it needs to be presented as. Alright, I'm going to take the eyebrow here. I'm going to pull it in towards the eye. And then we're going to drop this cheek bone down and horse were protruding out beyond that initial foundation we laid him before. That's because that initial foundation doesn't take into account the complexities of the sub anatomy. Okay, so we've got those general forms, but then we've got the sub forms on top. So we're going to take out that cheekbone and we're also keeping in mind the angle and the tilt of the head as we're observing it. So actually that cheekbone is probably going to drop just straight down. Okay. So we'll pull it in toward the mouth muzzle. In fact, his cheek is looking just a little bit too upset. So I'm going to make the transition softer, more seamless. Now got the mouth muzzle, which I'm going to lead down into the chin. And then when you've got when dropping down below it on small, we'll refine the face around the bottom of the chin a little bit more over the top of that outer outline and polish it up. We'll define the outline of the bottom lip with just some little lines there. Just to suggest the outline of the bottom lip. And I'm going to widen the chin some more ever so slightly because I feel like it needs it. Looking too pointy at this point. Once I lacked the width that I've gone with, the new width, I'm going to go over the top of it again and polish it up. You can see I'm making these ever so slight tweaks, getting it closer, closer to what I wanted to be. So always remember that drawing is a sculpting process. Especially in the penciling stage, where you're really trying to get things down before you enter the inking. Important to get it right. Next, we'll place in the ears running a darker outline around its shape to make it more vivid, to make it more refined. Then we'll start drawing in the interior anatomy. Beginning with the interframe. Having that transition into the cartilage that resides within the ear cup. As always, I'm going to try to make sure that Y shaped piece of cartilage on the inside of the ear is protruding out a bit. What makes the ear complicated to draw these angles is that it's anatomy is also foreshortened, gifted, and presented in these angles as well. It's already got some very complex anatomy and now all of that anatomy needs to be drawn in a different way from a different angle. So that's confusing for most people. That's difficult to pull off. Give it your best shot, and try to really understand the ear in as a very simple representation of what it should be. So simplify that anatomy. Break it down into a very basic three-dimensional model inside your head, and try to use that as a guide. Then we've got the jaw line, which we're going to refine the shape of leading it from the corners down to the chin. And then we're going to start to sculpt out the skull itself around the top, the dome piece, bringing it in at the back. In fact, we could even probably cut a little more away there. Bring it in tighter. You pick up your own visual cues. You see it's all about opening your reticular activation system. It's a big fancy word, but what it really is is just what you're paying attention to at any 1 in time. You're taking in a lot of information. But what are you actually paying attention to? For example, I'm sure that you couldn't tell me how many green items are sitting in your room right now? I couldn't tell you how many green items are sitting in my room, but I can probably see them in my peripherals. I probably know that they're there. I probably couldn't I probably couldn't even tell you what color socks I have on right now. So it's really interesting, even though we, we should be aware of those things and we should be able to record them, recall them. That's not necessarily the case. And so when it comes to drawing, we want to try to develop, articulate activation to hone in on the areas that we need to be paying attention to. And for me, that was the jaw line today. It was getting those shapes right. And really paying attention to that stuff. Because there's so many things we miss when it comes to drawing. What separates an image from a pro is someone who is actually able to catch those mistakes in the first place to who's able to see where they're going wrong. And developing the tools to be able to fix said Things is a whole different ball game. But if you can't see them in the first place, that's when you're really in a bad place. That's when you're really going to have some trouble. Okay, there we go. So now I'm going to just move these AI examples off to the side so that we can draw in the neck. This is going to drop down from behind the ear. Find that muscle a little bit that runs down from behind the ears into the center of the collarbone. The trapezius muscles as well. Which in this case I'm going to run up into the face. So the heads actually securing part of the neck there. But that just about does it for our top-down, a three-quarter view of the human head, a little bit of a trickier one, but still achievable nonetheless, if we really set our mind to it. 4. Bottom Up Front View: Okay, so to draw the bottom-up front view of the head, we're going to start out with a sphere. Just as before. It's all the same process, no matter what view you're drawing a head on. So if there's one thing you're going to get really good at, it's drawing spheres. Now I can honestly tell you the more you do this that just the more and more comfortable It's going to feel, it's actually going to be fun at some point. Trust me, it's going to be fun, I promise you, will AND axes. And that's just going to go straight through the top and the bottom since we're looking directly at the front of the head, except in an upward tilt. Draw the horizontal guideline around the belly of the sphere. And this time you'll notice that that guideline is curving upward. So that's a good general rule to keep in mind, is if you're looking up at the head, then the horizontal guideline will be curving away from you. It'll be curving upward. In fact, no matter what direction the head is looking in, the guidelines should be curving away from you in that direction. Then we'll draw in the center line. And this time we're going to see the opposite foreshortening effect happen. Everything's going to get smaller and more compressed toward the top of the head. So why was to lay in some very rough guidelines here? We would see that as we chop off the sides of our cranium, those side planes are going to follow the same angle. So that's how, that's how, I guess you could think of it as. Third of perspective. That is being applied to the head right now in this more dynamic view. And believe it or not, this is really, really difficult to pull off. So if you are able to even make an attempt at it, That's incredible. Most portrait artists are really, really good at drawing the head from the standard points of view, but you ask them to draw more dynamic representation and they cannot. Okay, So this really is some magical ability that you're cultivating here. You'll be a wizard. Once you learn how to do it properly. So I'll just erase away the sides of the head there. And what we're left with is of course the cranium. Now there is still going to be somewhat of an inward angle applied as a drawer in just a moment. As I'll show you, it just won't be as angled inward as it normally would be. So where's the chin going to sit here? Well, this is something you can estimate as we have done the previous angles, I might place mine about here. But you could also take this bottom node and this top third, and you could measure out at another third in order to find where it should be placed. After a while, you'll be able to just place it down somewhere and that looks right and it probably will be fairly accurate. Okay. So let's lay in the jaw line and the jaw line is probably the trickiest component to this particular angle that we're looking at the head on. And this because now it's widened. So normally the jaw would be like this. This would be the general shape of it if we were looking at the head from the front. But now that we're looking at it from below, well, this line is going to widen, this one and so will this one. And the chin is going to lift to adapt the entire shape is just completely morphed. Or drawing the sides of our jaw, which are going to drop down this time. So we get the opposite effect of the previous two examples where we were looking at the top, at the head from the top. And instead now the sides of the jaw above the corners are going to be elongated. Whereas the point that while the edge joining the corners of the Georgia, the chin are actually going to be shortened, but they'll also be flattened out here. So we'll get an inverted look, slightly inverted look at the jaw. What I'm placing in now are just the the drawer thickness. It think of it as the jaw line. Because actually you've got basically, I guess you could say a horseshoe shape for the jaw bone itself and a little bit of muscles sitting on the interior of that horseshoe shape. Okay, so again, this is really tricky. But the best way that I have found to think about this is, as I said, you've got the horseshoe, which would look a bit like this, let's say, for example, from the front view. And then when we're looking down on it, we can see more of the curve of that horseshoe, right? So it extends. And then when we're looking at the head from below, looking up at it, the horse shoe. It ends up inverting at some point. And we can see the bottom of the jaw instead of the top. So think about it in that way. And if it doesn't look right, it may mean that you simply need to lower the chin a bit or you need to raise it more. Regardless, this is a weird perspective to view the head on it even in real life because we're not used to seeing it from below. Alright, so now that we've got the jaw line figured out, we need to establish where the nose is going to sit. And it's still going to sit in the middle of the brow and the chin. But it's going to be foreshortened in the opposite direction this time. So it'll actually sit a little higher than those positioning will probably be about here. In fact, the distance between the nose line and the chin will be divided up into thirds. And there'll be wider. The amount of the bottom third will actually have the most amount of space this time. Whereas the top two-thirds will have an increasingly smaller amount of space. Because again, it's foreshortening in the opposite direction this time around the bottom of the face is what is closest to us. Well, the top of the head is further away. You'll notice that the juul looks much more square now two. Alright, and the eyes are going to drop as well. So again, we'll take the distance between the chin, the top of the head and we'll divide it in half. And I would say it's going to be about here. Okay. So this will be where the ISC and you can see that they're sitting quiet low. Now I am going to use just a straight line that runs from one side to the other. Because said before the head or the eyes do sit on a flat plane. Alright. And then we'll lay in the ears. They going to sit much, much lower this time. Below the equator line that we laid in for the sphere initially. And then we can draw in the neck. The neck is just going to drop down from underneath the ears. We'll lay in the trapezius muscles behind the neck cylinder. Then what's interesting is we can start to lay in the side muscles except this time we're going to see them come in a little bit. We'll also see that underside plane of the jaw now defined. Okay, So we get something that looks like this. It's an interesting angle to present their head on because we often don't see this stuff. At least an irregular head drawing. That's where so many people find it extremely difficult to draw the head from this angle. It always comes out looking weird for them. Might've been coming out looking weird for me. Actually. I won't speak too soon to go ahead and lay in the head planes. Okay. So we got the plane divisions around the outside of the brow. And then we'll lay in the plane division separating the front of their face from the sides of the face. From this angle. It's going to look a little bit like this. It'll say that the chin is going to be quiet a lot broader as well. Good to mention that the width of the chin actually increases. Quite a lot since it's closest to us now. Okay, So rather than everything narrowing out toward the bottom of the face, it's going to extend, it's going to grow wider. Wonderful. Now I'm just going to increase size of my head here so that we can get a better look at it. There we go. And oftentimes it's difficult for me to draw at this level of scale. By the way, I like to draw things from a distance. Really zoomed out to begin with so that I've got an overall look at how it's all coming together. So this should be interesting. Observe how this comes out. Alright, so let's start with the eyes. Now. In simple terms. The eyes from the bottom up front view are going to look like this. They're going to be flat along the bottom. Then they're going to be arched along the top. Like a setting sun. You want to complicate the shape. Then it would look a little bit more like this. You'd have bottom of the eye here. And the top of the eye, Then the side of the eye. So again, that eye shape is foreshortened. And we can also see how it follows the curve of the eyeball. So we're going to keep that in mind as we now lay in the eyes. Remember we want an equal width between HIS. So we'll quickly sketch this in. And what I want you to notice here as I do, is how I'm keeping these lines quite straight as I lay in the initial draft for the eye. Look at the shape that I'm using here. Try to imitate it. Especially if you're having trouble capturing that the right shape for the I is that you're looking for. Because once you've got that down, you can simply go over the top of it. And in fact, I'll, I'll lay in the other 1 first because this really helps with sizing and making sure the eyes are positioned where they need to be. Without over complicating things too much. This nice curve happening around the bottom of the eye. I'm really thinking about how the top eyelid and the bottom eyelid are going to follow the curve of the eyeball. And now I'll refine that shape at basic shape that I used initially. To draw this in. I'm just going around the outside of that shape, which I sketched in lightly. I'm refining it now. I really want to give the sense like with looking up at the eye here. So I'm thinking about the eyeball as well. How the eyelids are wrapping around it. Okay, Cool. So we've got the basic shape laid in there and try to get your eyes to be the same size. I can already tell that one of my eyes is probably bigger than the other. They look about right though, so it should be fine. Just don't, don't flip your canvas around and you can hide from your asymmetry mistakes forever, as long as you don't do that. Okay, next up, we'll draw in the eyelashes. We're going to see more of the top eyelashes this time around than the bottom. I'm just really simplifying the eyelashes in my head, but you can later on go with whatever eyelash style U1. I like the Michael Turner look. You can go for something else if you like. Probably a little bit too thick of an eyelash for a male character. But it'll work for now. This time around autumn set of eyelashes will be narrower, wouldn't see as much of them. So we get the inverse effect of what the head appears as when we're looking down on it. When we're drawing it from below. Sketching out the basic shape for the eyelashes on the opposite eye. Filling them in very, very roughly. We'll do that for both the bottom set of eyelashes and the top set of eyelashes. So that's how I sorted. Difficult to draw from this angle. Again, because we're just not used to it. It's a different eye shape. We'd been learning how to draw rise all over again basically. Okay, next up, we're going to go ahead and start to place in some of the surrounding eye anatomy which can be tough. So we've got this ridge here. Well, you can think of this particular ridge as the the edge of the eye socket. The edge of the eye socket at least, which will lead up into the edge of the top eye socket. So we'll do that on both sides or our eyes. And we can see more of that top eyelid there. In this view, you might have to make a few tweaks here and there. I certainly do my eraser out, trimming things up. Nursing. I'm Vanessa when it comes to my art. And it's good to be a Vanessa to a certain point. Next up, we'll draw in the pupils and the iris. Now this is important to keep in mind. Remember that a pupil sits back into the iris a little bit. So by looking at the IRS from below, the people, it's going to be sitting back here. Same deal on our eyes. In this illustration. Drawing the pupil and what well, it will draw on the iris to begin with. But then that iris is going to be sitting down here inside the pupil. It's not going to be sitting up here because that would look weird. It's gonna be sitting down inside the iris. So we'll put it down there. And we'll do the same on the opposite eye as well. Now of course, that's only if the eyes are looking up. They could be looking down at you and it would be different case then it's just worth keeping in mind. We'll add another reflection to our eye. And there's another thing that's worth noting here when it comes to drawing the head from below. That is, remember that we've got this membrane that sits over the top of the iris. And so what does that membrane do? Well, it actually pushes the top eyelid up when we're looking upward. So we're going to want to want to push that top eyelid up as needed. So it actually changes the shape of the eye itself. Alright, next we'll draw in the eyebrows. Now the eyebrows are sitting all the way up here. So what we'll do first up is it's trying to capture good shape for them. Rather than slanting downward. They're going to be slanting upward this time around, since we're looking at the head from below. Again, another inversion that will happen in comparison between these two head views. I'm adding a little bit of shape there to the eyebrow. Want it to be too box-like. Much. It's starting to look box-like. So there's a shape, a bit. Same deal on the opposite side. Drawing a basic eyebrow shape. Pull it back down into a point. Not thinking about the eyebrow hair, not thinking about any of the other added complications that come beyond that basic Irish brow shape. Because it's really that shape that matters at this point in time. So I don't like to think too far ahead. I like to focus on place I met within the illustration at the moment. And I build on top of that as I progress through it. But if I start to think about everything all at once and I start to stress about it. I'm gonna freak myself out. I get all anxious about what it is I'm working on and that's the last thing I want to have fun when I'm drawing. I want it. I'm gonna be challenged, but I also want it to be easy. I don't want it to be and surmountable challenge every single time. Now that we've got the eyebrow shape drawn in, we can focus on getting those eyes, eyebrows, strands place down, varying up their placement in comparison to one another. We don't, we don't want too many patterns happening. You don't want the eye to click on to any patterns anyway. So randomize the distancing between these eyebrows. Eyebrows up for his son, clusters of eyebrow for that are close together, some that are further apart. Surprise the viewer. Okay, that's our eyebrows down. We can add in a little bit of rendering around this area is oftentimes what ends up happening is shadow. Darker tones get caught in here due to the planes that we're dealing within that area. Sometimes you can get complete thick shadow happening in this place right here. But we won't we won't take it that far today. We'll just leave it as that. I think that works for now as is. Alright, this is the tricky part. This is where we're going to now draw in the nose. And the nose is no easy task from this angle because it can quickly all go wrong in end up fast with a character that looks like they have a snout rather than a nose. So be very careful about how much of that bottom plane of the nose you can actually see. Now the top of the nose is going to start up here. And the bridge will come all the way down. But the underside plane of the nose, where is that going to sit? Well, this is where the placement of the nose is going to be. As always, we'll drop the bottom of it just below that soap. Really this placement for the nose is usually about the middle of the noise, the middle point. And so that underside plane of the noise is probably going to be, well, it might actually be shifted up quite a lot. So maybe to about here. I'm guessing at this point. That's what I'm going to start out with, is that underside noise playing, basically sketch it in there. And you'll notice that the back of this nose plane is actually going to follow the cylindrical form of the mouth muzzle. We talk about the mouth muzzle in a later lesson as well. By the way, when we focus on facial features, specifically, that looks about right for the nose. We're going to draw in the anatomy for the underside plane now, which mostly consists of the nostril openings. Now as I said, you can get some really extreme angles for the head that place the tip of the nose above the the head itself. Now the nostril openings. And you can see the shadow that I placed in there. I'll leave the shape of a, you can think of it as an upside down comma six, the number six. That's where the shadow would be anyway. And I mean, the actual nostril opening itself usually looks a little bit like this. Okay, and then traveling up into the nostril opening, we get that cache shadow is what gives you the shape. Usually the underside of the nose is actually placed into shadow. So there'll be some subtle rendering there sometimes. And then we've got the sidewalls of the nose here to going to run down into the cheekbone, the top of the cheek bone, and also ridge of the eye socket. So we'll actually see that defined here. Just underneath the eye. So that's the nose. Again, pretty darn complicated to draw from this angle. It'll take some practice. So it makes sure that you fill your sketchbook up with the pages of the nose shot from below and you'll get more comfortable with it. Again, it's about thinking of the basic representation of the nose block form and how that looks from different angles. And in this particular example, we're looking at it from below. The nose bridge is going to be foreshortened. We're going to see more of the bottom nose plane. And these side planes are actually going to shift in terms of their angle as well. All important things to think about and consider. Next, we'll lay in the mouth. The mouth is going to follow a curve in the opposite direction. So it's going to be a sad mouth. Now instead of a happy mouth. Again, it's all due to the mouth muzzle. But you can think of as being like a tuna can. I like to reshape it a little bit into something more like this. But that's what we're working with. So we'll start with the middle of the mouth. Rule, the rest of the opening downward. And of course this time it's going to be wide, it's going to be quiet. Why? Because it's closest to us. So even though it would usually aligned with the middle of the eye, well, it's going to spread out further apart this time. Beyond that middle point of the eye. Will see the bottom of the top lip. At least we'll see more of it in this view. And then we'll define it ever so slightly, taking it down into the corners of the mouth. You can see the whole face looks squashed from this angle and it's because it is squashed, the foreshortening is squashing it. It looks dramatically different. You can have a person that looks entirely like a different person from these different points of view. Then we've got the bottom lip. Then it'd be seeing less of its top plane. And then we've got this underside plane that sits below the bottom lip and ends up joining onto the top of the chin. We'll add in a little bit of shading to the top lip. Not too much, just a subtle amount. Now, this still looks a little bit off. So what I'm going to do is tweak the chin a bit. I'm actually bring that up somewhat. And it's about getting everything right when compared to everything else. So now I'm looking at where I've placed the facial features and I'm looking at where the jaw line is. And I see that these two things, they're not matching up, even though I went through the process of laying down those foundations, trying to get them as accurate as possible. But there is a point where your eye comes into it. And even if, even if in reality this angle does look a little bit weird to observe a person on, in a comic book. It's gonna look kinda good. It shouldn't look very weird. That's the, that's the thing about drawing comic books is you're, you're tweaking things. You're printing things up. You're creating a rosier image of reality. Because this is a less common view that most people draw the head on. It's, it's more uncomfortable for them. And I can certainly say that even about myself were often drawing heads from hello or, well, sorry, we're often drawing heads story from the front, from the side or their standard views. But then when we're drawing it from below or above, it gets a bit trickier. In saying that there was a panel that I drew up recently for a comic book that I'm working on, which was showing a woman's head from below. And I implemented a lot of this stuff that I'm showing you right here. It always works better when you're not on show, demonstrating for other people for some reason. But nonetheless, these rules certainly still apply. And one thing that I'm probably going to do here as well is just Shift down the top of the head ever so slightly. I can see that that needs to come down lower. And I'm also going to place the curve, especially on the forehead, the front of the head. On a little bit of an angle, a little bit more of an angle two. So let's say that this is the top of the head here. Well, I'm actually going to have more of a like rather than a perfect curve. It's going to foreshortened toward the top of that spherical shape. Toward the top of the cranium? Yes. Creating more of an egg-like shape around the sides here as well. We're going to push that angle more. Again. It's all to do it that foreshortening that's taking place. It's morphing their head in really weird and interesting ways. In order to capture that accurately with the idealized representation of the human head proportions. You've got to know how they shift and how they are modified according to these different viewpoints. All right, so again, getting out my eraser, trimming it up a little bit, caving bits of the form off. Just like it was a place of clay. I do wish that you could just depend on the foundations and the construction process to nail a perfect hair each and every single time. But you just can. You've gotta have some creative input. It's not mathematics. So we will round out the top of the head a little bit more here. And even flattened it out here on the bottom. Main heck, the top of the head here is getting the most amount of modification, the most amount of attention out of everything else. It's the outline actually of the anything you draw that that matters quite a considerable amount. Can be the outline of the head. It can be the outline of the facial features on the hair. They can be talking about the full figure. It can be the outline of the body overall. Can be the outline of the muscles that sit within the body. It's all about that outside shape. Making sure that that's at vivid and captured correctly, as correctly as you can capture it. Okay, Well, I think that looks pretty good. Now the final thing we need to do is the ears, because we forgot about the ears. So let's go back and address them. I'm going to do some cleaning up here because it's getting a bit messy. Get my eraser out and we go, That's looking much better. We certainly don't want one ears sticking out more than the other, and we do want them to be at the same height. That's important. I have been called out for that before a Clayton did you know that one year is sitting higher than the other? That's the worst because sometimes you don't notice it yourself. And again, that's what I'm talking about, that reticular activation system, you want to get trained in noticing that kind of thing. Cross checking, making sure everything's on point. You don't know what to look for in the beginning. It's difficult. That's half the challenge is knowing what to look for as far as mistakes are concerned and whatnot. And then of course, knowing how to fix those mistakes. Okay, There we go. Next, let's lay in the frame of the ear. Now this time it's foreshortened in the opposite direction. So we're going to see some interesting changes within the way in which the anatomy is represented. Here. We go. That ear is, anatomy is bulging out way too much there. Look swollen, so we'll bring it in a bit. Move over to the ear on the opposite side of the head. There we go. Again, just trying to describe that anatomy as best as we can. Kind of figure out what parts of the anatomy will be seen, what posits of the anatomy won't be seen. So a lot of mental processing. You can walk away from dead the drawing board and just feel mentally exhausted. But hey, it's a lot of fun though. It is a lot of fun. It's very fulfilling. I think, especially when you've been productive. The drawing board. A cool. So we've got the ears drawn in there. I think that just about wraps up our first bottom-up head view. 5. Bottom Up Three Quarter View: Now let's draw up the bottom-up three-quarter view of the head. Will lay in a sphere. Try to get that sphere measured up to our previous heads so that we can get them all nice and lined up next to one another at the same scale. Drawing it in lightly, keeping my grip loose, lines, soft. I'm going to lay in the axes and that's going to, you can see there's a bit of a tilt happening because the head is looking up. And we'll have that coming through the top and at the bottom. We'll draw in a horizontal guideline. Will wrap around the equator of the sphere. It's a bit like a spinning top. And then we've got the center line. I'm going to market at about here. By doing that, it makes it much easier for us to bring that line around the curve of the rest of the sphere. Amartya bottom here as well. Then we'll draw on that side plane. I'm going to mark the width of the side plane at about there. And then when the rest of it. Okay, cool. So that's our cranium figured out from this angle. Next, let's lay in the center line of the face. Take that down to about here. That looks pretty good. Place in the chin. Next, we'll capture the jaw line. I think the jaw shape again is probably one of the most difficult aspects of drawing the head from this angle. Because we're just not used to seeing it shaped at these angles. But as I said before, the general draw shape, as it lifts up is eventually going to lift up so high that it in fact inverts. Alright? So just think of it like that. And it will make it easier even if it's only an outline. Of course, from the three-quarter view. Let's say that the jaw line would usually be like this. Well, that's three-quarter view as it lifts up. That's going to change. Eventually. It will also invert. Join the opposite side of the face now. Bring down the other side of the jaw. Lift the chin up a bit more. I think that's looking at kay? Really roughly draw in the ear very lightly. And then draw in the back of the neck. And I'm actually going to re-size it so that once again, it's roughly the same size as the head we did previously. We'll figure out where the nose is going to be by dividing the distance between the brow line and the chin in half. And because we're looking at a foreshortened view of the head from below. While that positioning is going to be probably about here, I would estimate. Then we'll divide the bottom half of the face up into thirds. Shortening the distance between those thirds as we go up the head. Because the bottom is closest to us. So in contrast, it's going to widen the distance between them. Wonderful. Next up, we'll add in the eyes. So the eyes are going to take the midway point between the top of the head, the top of the face here in the chin. I'm going to just estimate that it would be about here. Drawing the head planes. You can see that I've drawn in the roof of the brow, the underside plane. We've got a protruding outward on an angle. I'm also going to go ahead here and lay in the mouth muzzle, describing the shape of the face and that three-quarter angle. And find that this is just tends to help me shape the face properly. On this angle. Sculpting and add a bit there. Getting sketchy. When I'm getting sketch, it usually means that I know what the heck I'm doing. And I'm exploring with the pencil. Anyway, I think that'll do for now. I'm just going to put it on the back burner. And I'm going to start to lay in the facial features. And now from this angle, the basic shape for the I is going to be this shape. So going with that, start sketching in the eye, following the curve of the eyeball. And then we've got the nose. The nose is going to be obscuring the opposite eye quite a lot. Okay, it's the bridge of the nose, maybe even the tip of the nose. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to draw this little guideline out shooting from the front of the face. Then I'll draw in the underside plane of the nose. Now I'll draw back the bridge and then I'll reshape it once I've got that general block form placed in. I sometimes will use these simple block forms as a guide, essentially in order to figure out where my facial features are going to be placed and how they're going to be placed. So then from that, again, thinking of it like a, like a piece of clay, start drawing out the rest of it. Once again, this is a very difficult angle to draw on. Some days will be easier than others. I'll draw in the industrial opening. Now that I'm happy with how things are looking. What's also tough is that even though these facial features are foreshortened here, they should be foreshortened relative to everything else. So in other words, you don't want, even though the nose might be bigger, you don't want it to be bigger in comparison to everything else. It should be still within the issue, still uphold the proportional relationships it has with the other facial features. If indeed it's supposed to be an idealized nose with an idealized size and shape. And perfecting that shape or more. Trying to get it to look right here you can see the opposite eye is going to be so hidden now. So I'll draw on the top of it there, but most of it is obscured at this point. Now clean up, this is sketchiness a bit. Fill in the nostril with black because it would be a fairly hard shadow happening in that area. Now, I'm just tweaking the nostril shapes, trying to get it just the way that I want it. But this cushioning a little bit at the tip of the nose, which sometimes you'll see it again. Just start out with this basic block formation for the nose. That'll allow you to get those nostrils placed it. And I kinda deviated away from that basic model a little. And I think I paid for it, to be honest with you. What I'm gonna do is just another crack at that. Okay, that's better. So you keep it simple. Keep it simple, stupid. That's the rule of thumb to keep in mind. When it comes to this stuff. As soon as it gets over complicated, That's when you run into problems. Alright? Then we'll draw in the side of the nostril there. It's not perfect this nose, but we'll leave it as is for a moment and maybe come back to it. Okay, So now the, the, I will jump back to that, drawing the eyelashes very quickly defining the shape for them. Fill them in with black. So draw some eyelashes along the bottom of the eye there. In a set of eyelashes sense, we can't see as much of the top of them anymore. Then we'll draw in the eyelid by defining the inner edge of the eye socket and the top ridge of the eye socket. Like so. I'm placing the iris and the pupil, which is going to sit into the iris. Add a little reflection in there just to give the eyes a nice wet look. And then we want to add in the eyebrows. So we get a foreshortened look at the eyebrow shape from this angle to now they're going to be pushed further forward than they usually would be due to the geometry of the head shifting with this new position that we're observing them head on. And I'm going to try to have that eyebrow follow the angle of the eyeline because everything should. The boxes, being aware of the head is being presented in perspective just like this box here that I'm drawing. Everything on this, this phase plane should be following that perspective. The ear would be over here. So that's essentially what's happening. That's how you, you kinda make sure that things are looking in perspective the way that they should be. But making sure that they align along that perspective. As always, I'm taking my time to capture a nice shape. The eyebrow here. I'll do the same thing on the opposite side. And from this angle we're going to really see how the underside plane of the brow pills around and back into the head. Okay, cool. There we go. You're going to see the top of the upper eye socket there. Just a sneak peak of it popping out from behind the nose. Sometimes we think that everything has to be shown. And I both eyes, we need to see both eyes and their full completion at all times if we're looking at the head no matter what the angle, but actually no, that's not true. Sometimes there's going to be certain facial features that are very hidden and obscure and by others that are shifting due to the crazy perspectives that the head is being presented on. That nose is looking good. Now I'm happy with it. Now we'll draw in some eyebrow first some texture into the eyebrows. Now the mouth. Now, in order to draw the mouth, I mean, you can keep it pretty simple. You can have just, you can start out with a line that follows the trajectory that you want the mouth to be on. Let's say, for example, this. Once you've got that line in there, you just add in the middle of the mouth. You pull out the sides of the mouth, lead them into the corners. Do the same thing on the opposite side. And then draw on that top lip. Now remember the top lip is going to come out would it won't go straight up. It will actually come out on an angle. It's important to keep in mind. Then we've got the bottom lip. Remember as well that the underside plane that comes down just below the bottom lip is going to go back on an angle too. Now of course, we can break this outline for the top lip as well, especially on a guy. In some facts, some people, just, some artists, they just leave the outline for the top lip completely and they don't even bother putting it in if they're drawing a man. So just keep that in mind. I'm really only outlining it here for you so you can see the shape. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll, I'll place it into shadow. Okay. Now, as I was saying before, side of the face and its shape will consist of the cheekbone, the mouth, muzzle, and then the chin, which will lead down into the neck. And C here as well that I am most certainly trimming back the chin and the jaw line and I'm reshaping at re tweaking it. The bottom plane and the jaw line there. We'll add an a darker outline over the top of the jaw line to define it, making it nice and vivid. Now sometimes that undecided plane in a finished drawing will be completely cost in black shadow. Sometimes it won't be. It depends on the style. Depends on how much shadow typically you like to use within your comic book art. Sometimes there'll be rendered, sometimes there'll be just left blank. And it'll be left up to the colorist to describe that plane shift as it faces away from the line. Okay, next up, we'll lay in the ear. Starting with it's outside shape. Defining that. From the top all around, all the way around to the bottom. Instead, it's done. And we'll take our time to tweak the shape of the ear, by the way, all the facial features. We'll take our time to really nail down that shape. Once it's nailed down, start to looking a little bit too wide for the here at this angle. Sometimes you only catch things after the fact. You hear professional comic book artist like David Fincher say that all the time work will go through to print and it'll only be after it's printed that you might notice, Oh, ****, you made a mistake. Isn't good. Of course. Just know though that this happens to a lot of different artists. And the best you can do in order to become a pro is to notice those mistakes so that you can fix them before it goes to print. Alright, so then we've got the inner frame of the ear, which we'll transition into this Y-shaped piece of cartilage that kinda protrudes out of the ear. And then we'll draw the bottom of that down into the base of the ear. Have a transition into the ear opening or the ear opening covering rather. Then we'll bring that out of cartilage back in. Girls in on itself. The ear anatomy. Again, it's a little tricky, but it's something that you work on. And you get better at with repetition. Like practicing a song or remembering a script. Sounds really cheap to just say practice. That's true. That's what it is. But it's about You might, I could give you the manual to fly a plane, but you don't go into knowing how to fly it. Straightaway just because I've given you the manual, you'll need to practice it a few times. Hopefully you I need to crash in order to learn how to do it, but you get my meaning. Okay, So we've got the ear drawn in. Now it's time to shape and finesse the top of the skull a little more. You're going to flatten that out on top a little. Bring it all the way back. Transition into the back portion of the skull, and then down into the neck. Define the outline of the neck a little bit more. Indicate that main band like neck muscle runs down from the ears and answer the collarbone. And that is that. That completes the bottom up view of the three chord ahead. 6. Head Perspective Exercise: So to get an added handle on this stuff, I want to show you a really quick exercise and you can practice this for homework if you would like. But it's very, very simple. And it'll help you to get your head around this stuff. No pun intended. But if you want to get good at drawing the face from different angles, start off with just the basic phase plane. Okay, So let's say you wanted to draw the face from below and you are having some trouble with it. Well, start with this basic shape, right? Let's say that the eyes are going to sit in the middle of this shape. I'm sitting there. We've got the nose, facial features, plot them out and where they're supposed to go. But you can take this very basic face shape and draw it up from any angle you like. And what it's going to do is allow you to be able to practice just for shortening where the facial features should be. You don't have to draw facial features on there. I mean, you could, if you wanted to, you could make it as complex and complicated as you like. If you want to draw the block form nose in. Sometimes that's fun to do. Heck, you could make it a triangle. If you want. Something very, very simple. But really just plotting out the proportions or little dashes for eyes will really help you out. Okay, is another example here. The nose, we've got the positioning of the mouth. Look at a little dash for the eyes, triangle for the nose. And just practice drawing the facial features in perspective and taking note on what happens when you begin to foreshortened them. Now what you could do when you're feeling confident with that is you can go ahead and actually apply them onto a block. And you're not necessarily going to use this as a construction method for your heads. But what it'll do is it'll just help, help you to understand what's happening when you throw the head into perspective and start drawing it in a foreshortened men at what's happening with the facial features. And I sincerely think that this could help you out in a big way. Because this cube form isn't that far of a stretch. When it comes to the head itself. There's actually a lot of characteristics that are indeed shares. And you know, you could develop this further and further as much as you like, like if we were to actually turn this into an actual finished head, you could very quickly do that like you could just build on top of this row in the cheek bone and the chin, or in the jaw line, the ears. You might have to rejig the proportions of the box to suit the head, but it'll, it'll give you an added level of three-dimensional reality, I believe, to the representation of your heads if you are able to practice it and really try to understand it. So it's just a really quick little tip. I thought I'd leave you with practice it throughout the week and also practice the other head examples that we went over in this lesson. And hopefully by the end of the week you'll have a, you'd be feeling a little more confident with them because they are difficult angles. The intimidating for most people even will experienced artists. And the way in which you get around that is you just draw them over and over again until you become completely familiar with them like an old friend. Alright, that's it. 7. Dynamic Heads Assignment: Hey, it's Clayton again. I hope you enjoyed the class. Now it's time for the assignments so that you can put what you've learned into action and really assimilate these skills so that you can take full advantage of them. First up, I'd like you to break open your sketchbook or your favorite digital drawing application and draw your own dynamic heads from the top-down, Top-down, three-quarter, bottom-up and bottom-up three-quarter perspective is that we covered throughout this class. But then taking the tools that we learned about as far as turning the basic foundational structure of the head in space, I'd like you to really challenge yourself. See what other angles you can draw the head on by thinking of it in that simplified way. And let me know how you go post your assignments in the project section of this class because I would love to see them. Alright, that's it. Until next time. Good luck.