How To Draw Heads & Faces Workshop: Drawing Unique Character Heads, Facial Features & Hair Styles

1. Introduction: Hey, it's clayton. Welcome to my class on drawing unique character heads. Throughout these lessons, you're going to discover how to add variety to the facial features of your characters, their face shape, hairstyles, and we'll even talk about how to incorporate head accessories to make your characters much more memorable. Well, without further ado, get your pencils and sketchbook ready or your favorite digital drawing application. And let's jump straight into this. 2. Block Head: Okay, So we'll start out with our cranium shape, which is just a circle, which we're going to convert into a sphere with a few guidelines in just a moment. The heads that we will draw up today with these examples are just going to be placed on a three-quarter angle. So nothing too dynamic, but they're not going to be flat. Front side on views either. We'll place in the axes and we'll draw in a horizontal line that runs around the belly of the sphere and ultimately represents the brow line. And then we'll lay in the middle of the face. Okay. Which tells us what direction the head is looking in. And essentially just shows us where the front of the face will be situated. Next up, we will place in the side plane. Now here's where we can start to begin messing around with how this general head shape is going to appear. We can either take off a little bit or we can take off a lot of the side of the head plane. Let's go ahead and try to take off just a little bit. Okay. So usually I would I'd push this out just a little further towards the center line. I'm going to make sure that center line is still placed in the middle of the face. So if I need to readjust it, I'll do that. Now. This isn't going to affect the, whether or not the head is narrow or whether or not it's going to be wider than usual a little bit. What will increase and push that effect even further is the length of the face. So is it going to be a long phase or is it going to be a short phase? Now before, when we were doing the idealized head, we would measure out the first top, top two-thirds of the face by drawing a line from one side to the other at the top of the temporal, flattened out at the sides of the skull to the other. And that would give us the first two-thirds and then we would just measure down one more third. And we would have the standard measurements of the face here. We're going to change things up. We might in fact this time around, we'll draw it down a little longer than we have been. So we'll draw it all the way down here. You can push this to an extreme. You can make it a subtle change. It depends on how realistic really you want your head to look. If you want to stylize it, create a caricature of whoever it is you're drawing, whatever character it is you might be representing on the page. Then really push that length, pull it right down. Next up, another area where we can really adjust how the shape of the face is going to appear on the page, is by going ahead and either adjusting the shape of the jaw line so we could make it more triangular. We could make it more square. And in this case, I think what I'll do is create a bit more of a rectangular jaw line. Okay, so I'm actually going to pull the corners of the jaw all the way down. So he's going to have, with this particular character, which I'm going to make a male character will have a fairly square, rectangular jaw line. Because I've pulled those corners so far down. We can adjust the broadness of the chin. Okay, so again, think about these areas as dials. You can dial the width, how wide certain areas is going to be. You can drag certain portions of the face down further than others. You can pull them up. It's elastic defying the face here, essentially pulling and pushing it into the shape that we want for the given character that we've decided to draw. This might look a bit funny. It might look a little bit odd. And that's because we are traveling outside and away from those idealized measurements. Alright, cool. So now that we've got the shape of the jaw defined and you can choose whatever shape you would like for your own head. Now you don't necessarily have to copy what I've got here. We can now figure out where the facial features are going to go and how large they are going to be. And again, there's a few adjustment knobs that we can turn here in order to achieve the effects that we're looking for. Now, where are the I is going to sit on the head will usually they would sit right in the middle of the overall length of the face. In this case, we can sit them either lower or we can sit them higher. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to place the eyes on this head down quite low. Going to place them about what actually know. What I'll do is I'll play some a little bit higher. Because if this was more of an idealized measurement as to where I was going to figure out how to place the eyes. I would probably place them here because that'll be about the midway point of the overall head. But instead of doing that, I'll play some a little bit. I'll play some a little bit higher just underneath the brow line that I've already established. So now we've got a large amount of space for the bottom portion of the face where the nose and the mouth will reside and a smaller amount of space at the top of the head. So you know, you've got a very, I guess you could say a character that looks like this is a bit more boneheaded looking in appearance. Like Frankenstein almost you could, you could think of this as. So what I'll do is figure out, so I've got the eyes now please. Next up, I'll get the noise drawn in there. Is the nose is going to be close to the eyes or is it going to be situated further down? Well, you know what, I think I'm going to place it all the way up here. Just underneath the eyes. So again, funny proportions, but it should lead to a very interesting and memorable result for this character. And as for the mouth, I'm going to place that all the way down here. And the chin will place that down there. Now you can place your mouth and your nose anywhere along this distance between the eye line and the chin that you would like. It really doesn't matter. Whatever is going to capture the character that you are looking to represent on the page. We'll place in the ears. Now, we can give this character a little ears, or we could give this character big ears. We know what the regular rules are at this point. Now we're bending them and it can feel a bit funny to break the rules, so to speak, after we spent so long learning them and keeping them in check. But this is a wonderful exercise, and it's only once we have learned the proper rules that we are able to properly manipulate them. Except I'll draw in these characters neck. I just feel like this is a thick neck kind of characters. So I'm gonna give him a thick neck. Now placing the head planes. So we'll have the division that separates the front of the face from the sides of the face. On either side here. Then the plane divisions around the side of the brow. Now let's define the hairline. Okay, now what I'll do is I'll give this character what's called a widow's peak hairline. So it's going to come down to a point in the middle and then back up. There's lots of different hair lines out there that you can look up. But the most common ones that you're going to see other receding hairline, of course, which some of us are already acquainted with. The widow's peak hairline and then just the one that runs straight from one side of the head to the other. There's a few of the different ones that beta away from the regulars, but you can really modify that hairline to make it whatever you want it to look like. Okay, Cool. So next let's actually draw in the facial features. Now the first question we have to ask ourselves if we're starting with the eyes is how big are the I is going to be? And where are they going to be placed? Will they be small and placed far apart, or will they be large and placed close together? We can really have some fun with this. I am going to go for some small eyes that are placed a little more toward the middle of the head. And of course we can mess around with the eye shapes as well. So I want this guy to look kind of intimidating. He's going to have a bit of a glare about him. So I'm going to make the top of the eyes quite straight. And I'm going to narrow them out as well. They're very small eyes. And as I said, they place right at the front of the face, which has this kind of predator like vibe about it. Because you think about a lion for example, or tiger. You know, these, these animals that are predators hunt other animals down. And their eyes are always placed at the front of their face. And they're quite small as well. So that's the kind of vibe that we're going for here. That's what we're able to incorporate. And that's the association that hopefully people will make to the character as well. Now what we'll do is go ahead and added some eyebrows which are going to sit right on top of his ICM. And I'm going to make them really thick too. If you're doing your own head, that is something different to this. You know, try to get inventive with it. It creative. Maybe you do sin eyebrows that sit really high up on the forehead. That's totally something that you could go with. Of course, use your eye to judge whether or not something is going to look good. Because though we can bend these rules, they can ultimately break if we bend them too much in the wrong direction. Okay, Wonderful. Now let's go ahead and draw in the nose. So we'll start with the bottom of the nose. And we'll make this nose quiet wide again just to really push that bone head appearance, that caveman appearance that we're going for. We can have the nostrils going upward on an upward angle. We could have them going on a downward angle. Basically, every single aspect of the facial shape and features and measurements can be tweaked in order to ultimately end up at a varied results. So what you'd otherwise have if you were just going with the standard measurements for the human head. Next will go and placed in the mouth. So we'll start out with the opening for that. Getting with the middle and then pulling the mouth opening all the way out. And you know what, we'll give him a quite a large mouth. So now what you'll end up with is this monkey-like appearance, I would say is a black appearance. Will give him a big bottom lip, which has already written with even the construction that we laid down to begin with because the fact that we laid in his chin so far down below the opening of the mouth. Now of course, we've got the ears too. So we'll draw those in. You can see that I'm working very lightly here. So it might be a little bit difficult to see what I'm doing, but this is really the way in which you want to work. You don't want to be using a super dark and heavy line that's hard to erase, That's hard to read, correct. And tweak if you decide that you want to change things later on. So what I'll do now is I will refine what I've placed down here on the page before going through and establishing a hairstyle for this character. So we'll start out with the eyes going over the top of what I've already done here. Just with a darker outline and refining essentially what's already there on the page. So this is the easy part. Believe it or not, you're adding in those details, polishing up the primary contours. That's when everything really when the roadmap should be laid out and you know exactly where this piece is going to be going. You really don't want too much to be left up to chance at this point. So the idea with any illustration, will there be drawing of a head or a full character, or a full cover or pin-up. Is that you want to make sure that you plan it all out first. Once it's planned, then it's very easy to go over the top of that and lay on the icing on top, right? So it's about making sure that that cake is nicely baked. And then once that's, once you know that's good to go. Well, you can then polish it up. Basically icing on top place the cherry or the declaration and whatnot place in his iris and his pupil. And we'll do that in both eyes. Next we'll outline the eyebrows going over the top of them. Defining that line with additional clarity. And what I'm looking for is nice, smooth, well weighted lines in the final drawing is I want these lines to no longer be sketchy. I don't want them to necessarily be lied, Eva. I want them to be nice and vivid. I think polished is the best term, but we're essentially cleaning up. What we had initially on the page. And we're turning it into a finished drawing. Every now and then I might hit the Undo button. Or if I'm doing this traditionally, go ahead and get out my eraser with things. If there's a certain portion of the drawing that's not necessarily going the way that I want it to go. And I'll make whatever changes are needed. So, um, those eyebrows there that I wanted to fix them up a little bit. What is that? All right. So we'll do the same thing with the opposite eyebrow. Again, outlining it first. Then placing in the, I guess the textual rendering, describe it as having here. Now we'll add in some additional details around the eyes just to describe some of the forms, such as the eye socket, the folds underneath the bottom eyelid. And all that does is just describe some of the anatomy around that area suddenly just enough to give it that extra visual interest. Realism takes it from looking like a, just a cartoon and actually pushes a more complex looking comic art style while still maintaining something that looks like a piece of comic book art, something that looks stylized and graphic in nature. So we've got the eyes drawn in there. L its place in the nose. And before I actually drawing the nose, what I'm going to do is I'll start off by erasing some of these construction lines because they're getting in the way a little bit and we don't we really don't need them anymore. At this point. They were really they were only there so that we knew where to place the facial features. Now that we've got those facial features placed, we can just do some erasing. Now I'm going to place in some folds and wrinkles around the brow. And these folds and wrinkles are caused by the muscles underneath the face. Contract and tort. In order to express certain emotions visually. Within the facial expressions the head is capable of. And over time, if there's, for example, a person who is typically very Smiley, who smiles all the time. They will develop wrinkles and folds in the areas of their face that use the muscles actually allowed them to smile. Is this someone who glares all the time? They're working on walking around angry and whatnot. Then again, they would develop the same lines and folds in their face that they use in order to allow them to express those particular facial expressions. So I'm going to lay in a shape for the nose bridge. Now keep in mind there's a number of different shapes that you can use for the nose, especially the bridge. So if I go over here and I draw the nose from the side, well, you've got this kind of big nose that you can use for the nose. This beak like shape. I guess it's I guess this would be more of a beak shape, wouldn't it? You can play around with these experiment and see what you can come up with. It'll be uses the same bits and pieces. You can have a nose that is pointed upward where you're going to see more of that underside plane, at least from the front. And have all different sorts of noses. Variety of noises that you could have is endless. I've decided on this particular node shape for the character that I'm drawing here. Place in the nostril, even on outdoor idealized heads, we still had nostrils and whatnot. It's just that now they're depicted differently in order to create the variations that we're seeing in this gentleman's face. I draw in some wrinkles around the sides of his nose. He's an angry dude. And I really want that to come across in this character. We can add in little bits of rendering to use face. If we really want to polish this up and make it more complete. We'll leave it at that for now though. I'm going for more of a stylized look in here in these particular head examples. Next up, we'll define the opening of his mouth. Drawing that in. Placing a darker, heavier line just underneath his bottom lip will even outline and suggest the shape of the bottom lip at the sides there. Now we'll go ahead and place in some light rendering just underneath the bottom lip. To describe that underside plane, the space between the bottom lip and the top of the chin lay in the nostril opening. All I will do to prepare that and fill it in is draw this little common type shape underneath the nostril opening. Fill it in. Okay, Wonderful. So I'm going to do some more erasing here, getting rid of those construction lines. And I'll start to define some of the underlying facial anatomy suggesting where the cheekbones might reside and the mouth muzzle as well. I'll start off by lightly sketching those in. Then once I, I think I'm happy with what I like to capture there, what I want to go for. I'll use a darker outline to essentially set it in stone. You can see I'm doubling up some of these lines just to add that little tiny bit more depth to the contour drawing. That's all you need. Sometimes you don't need heavy rendering in order to give your artwork depths to suggest form. It's funny coming from me because I do have a style which is much more detailed than this. But I do really pack on the rendering. But again, it's not always that necessary and sometimes it can, it can take away from the drawing. You can steal away the, the attention from certain other aspects of it. Okay, next up, we'll draw in the chin. And this character, I'm going to give him a bit of a bump chin. So you can have different shapes of chin as well, believe it or not. We'll put a little dimple just in the base there. All right, that's looking pretty good. We'll lay a little indentation in around the corners of the mouth to push them back and just create a little pocket within the anatomy there. Curve and the underside of the route brow back in towards the eye on the far side of the face. Then pull out the cheekbone to describe the shape of the face as it turns away from us. So we're getting a good look at the outline of the front of the face here on this angle. In this portion. Now, a lot of the decisions I'm making here, instinctual. Over time, you'll develop your own way of creating decisions and making them in order to arrive at the idealized representation of whatever head it is you would like to draw them by idealized in their contexts. I just mean what you desire to see within your head when you've drawn it. I'm going to add in a few more facial folds in around the nose. Draw those out, especially around the mouth. Because. The mouth and the eyes. They're both facial features that have a wide capability of expression. And because of that wide capability of expression, you'll find that a lot of the folds in the face reside within and around those facial features. The forehead. Obviously we know that that can really fold up and create lines across the top there. So that's another area of the head that moves around a lot. That the forehead is somewhat connected to the eyes. In other words, when the eyebrows raise, those folds within the forehead are going to begin to form. We'll add in a little dimple, that little indentation just above the top lip. And now we'll complete his jaw line. We're on a dark contour it down the sides. And then here I'm going to just going to shave off the sharp corner that I added in there right at the edge and adjust the shape. And then I'll take the bottom edge of the jaw and later into the chin. Next, I'll define the side jaw muscle. It's the back of the jaw. Very powerful muscle is the jar a lot of its power. And again, how much he defined the anatomy of your character's face is completely up to you and the requirements of that character, for example, we're going to do up a female head and just a little bit. And she will not have anywhere near the level of defining features and anatomy as this particular character does. Might add in some shading just on the underside of his top lip there to show that, yes, indeed it is facing away from the light source. Now as for the ears, let's do something interesting with these ears. Let's add in like a piercing. I'm not quite sure what you call these particular hearings, but I've seen them before. They sit inside the ear lobe and stretch it out quite a lot actually. And so this is a great way to customize the shape of the ear while also adding a facial accessory to it. So go ahead and place that in there. And now we'll attend to the top of the year, beginning it, the final outline for its shape. And we'll leave that down into the base of the year, which will travel around. This is earring that we've placed down and see quite a significant customization of the ear. General overall shape. That just as before, the next step that we're going to take is place in the interior frame of the outer ear. Then the Y shaped piece of cartilage will draw in. And so remember that isn't much as we are following a structure for the face, that structure can be stretched. As the ears indicate here, the shape of the ear has literally being stretched out in order to create a new representation for it. Finally, we'll add in the neck. Drawn in and we'll indicate some of the muscles, especially those large band like muscles that run down from behind the ear and into the center of the collarbone. They usually quite prominent and will be visible on the surface of the skin. We can also add in the Adam's apple male character here, believe it or not, women actually have an Adam's apple as well. It's just not as pronounced or as visible as it is on a man. Women share the same anatomy, for the most part. In fact, on the heap, but as far as the human face is concerned. Okay, well that's fantastic. So now that we've got our face to find and figured out it's time to give our character style. So this is something that we haven't touched on a whole lot. And what I'm going to do now is explain my approach to it. The first thing I like to do is figure out what kind of style am I going to go with for these characters here? Then the next step after that is to, well, let's just go ahead and I'll actually show you. Sometimes. Sometimes I don't exactly know what style out, what the character's hair to go in. And I'll just start drawing it out like this. And i'll, I'll see what happens. And what I do is I'll start laying in large clumps of hair. But I want a general idea to go, to go with here so that I can follow a particular direction. So this guy will be a gangster of some kind. Which means I'm thinking that he's going to have slightly longer hair on top and maybe shorter hair around the sides. And so with that said, I'm going to begin drawing out the larger portions of this hairstyle that to find its overall shape. Then the strategy from that point onward will be to divide those larger shapes up into smaller shapes, more and more until we get a certain amount of texture and organic appeal to the hair that we're drawing down onto this character's head. So you can see here that I'm keeping it very light and very wispy, very flee for free flowing. I'm just lightly drawing it in there. And unless you see this actually happening, it can be everybody who teaches this stuff tends to say, if you read it in books, knocking out the overall shape of the hairstyle first. That can be hard to interpret sometimes, at least I've found it hard to interpret anyway. So I need to see it done. And this is the way in which I came up with four actually laying in the general shape of my character, characters overall hairstyle, a somewhat mixing some textural qualities to it. In other words, I tried to suggest that it's already here as I'm laying in that basic overall shape. I think about how the hair might fold on itself. So it's, in a sense it's almost like fabric. It folds on itself. It has layers to it. And it is at the whim of the outside elements. So if your character is standing in the wind or they're standing in the rain, that's going to change how the hair is represented. Even if it's, if it's got a certain shape to it or certain style to it. So got his head drawn out very roughly the general overall shape of it. Then of course, it's shorter or around the sides. And so the way in which I'm going to represent that is I'm just going to have it combed back or appearing as though it's combed back. Now of course, you can have it completely shaved in different different people and interpret a shaved head in different ways. So it could be prickly like this. If we wanted to go for it. I've found that gangsters tend to use a lot of Greece in their hair. What a moose. And they kinda slick it back. I'm a big fan of gangster movies actually. Maybe that's why I sort of this character is demonstration. I'll know Honestly, I didn't have any idea that I was going to come up with this character. Actually. I just started tweaking the proportions and the character came about. And maybe you'll find that that's the same case for you as well. Sometimes the things that you draw, you just come up with them on a whim. And all of a sudden, it can really take its own, it can, it can end up taking on its own life. I'm actually going to tweak the trajectory of some of these side hair texture because I didn't quite like the way in which it was flowing. It seemed a little bit too straight. It wasn't really wrapping around the curved surface of the side of the head in the way that I wanted it to. So in this case, the hair because it's sitting so close to the head and it's combed right up against it. It will describe its shape just a little bit. Alright, but where do we take the hair from here? Well, we can actually start to divide it up. Now. We're going essentially what we've established is the overall shape of the hairstyle and the direction in which it's going to flow. So all the lines that we add in now to increase the detail, to break it up. I'm going to follow that same flow. Going to follow what we've already laid down, where it taking those larger clumps of hair. And now we're just breaking them up. And we're breaking them up in much the same way. We would break up the eyebrow hair. Okay, so as we lay in these contours, we're going to have some of them sitting very close together, others that are sitting very far apart. That's what's going to give the hair that we're drawing for our heads, that organic visual representation, because hair is very organic in nature, it's somewhat randomized. And you'll notice that these lines are very long and very elegant. So you do need somewhat of a steady hand in order to lay them in delicately. Really focus on the thickness of the line that you're laying down. You can see that I'm keeping mind quite thin. And in fact, the only thick lines that I ever laid down onto the page is fully outline of the character. All the lines on the interior of the drawing. Unless it's a main section like the underside of the cheek bones, for example, I'll usually use a thicker line. But other than that, I usually try to keep especially the minor lines like the folds in the face and whatnot and these divisions in the hair. I tried to keep them thin and subtle because I don't want them drawing too much attention to themselves. There's a hierarchy or visual interpretation that needs to be cultivated when it comes to your drawings. In other words, as certain areas within the drawing that you want the viewer to pay attention to first. And usually those areas are going to be the ones with thick outlines placed around them. So the eyes, for example, have thick outlines around them. And that's where the viewer's attention will go first. Most of the time are a number of other reasons too, but that's definitely one of them. So you don't want the viewer to be honing in, for example, on the individual separations within the hair. You want them to be more focused on the general hairstyle as a whole, right? And so you outline the general hairstyle as a whole with a thicker outline. But then in order for that visual interpretation to unfold in the correct way, you keep the interior hair details less obvious, less prominent, subtle our work. I'm going around this entire shape and I'm dividing it up while at the same time defining its shape, its overall style. On the bottom of the hair, we might give it a slightly thicker outline, is to show that it is raised up over the head. Because in most situations is going to be a bit of a cast shadow created by the hair down onto the forehead. That just gives it that little bit more elevation, little bit more volume. I'm gonna be thinking, thinking about what kind of hair your character has as well. We have some very slipped back, straight sharp looking here here. But maybe your character has curly hair. And we'll do an example of curly hair and just a bit. But it's certainly something to keep in mind. As I said, there's, there's variations to almost everything that we're learning about. Throughout this workshop. Everything can be shifted, everything can change. And you'll notice that it's actually okay to change the rules up. It's not like anything bad necessarily happens. But as I've said before many times over, you've got to know what the rules are in order to give them properly without reading fundamental areas within your illustrations. So in other words, proportions that look off. Now, even though these aren't the idealized proportions, there's still some proportions which have been applied to this character's hair that if maintained and kept consistent, kept symmetrized properly, will ultimately achieve and give us the ability to be able to represent this character's head from one panel to the next. And whatever comic we might draw them in and have the viewer recognize them as being the same character. So in other words, if you are able to keep in mind what the proportions were that you changed your character's head in comparison to the idealized measurements that we initially came up with. When you should be able to draw the same character from a multitude of different angles and still have them look like the same character. Alright, so it all comes down to the proportions to character that you've chosen to go for and how you've adjusted them. If you remember how you adjusted them, what you modified from the initial idealised head in order to come up with your new unique head. Then that'll be the key to making your characters look the same from one panel to the next. I get that question a lot. You have to also remember though, that people can look very, very different in the profile view when compared to the front view, there are two extremely different angles. And so in that case, what will allow you to roll the assumption that you're looking at the same character in those dramatically different angles is things like hair color, things like design elements that you might have incorporated into the face of the character or even into their overall outfit. Then once you've drawn that character in the front view, once, once you've drawn that character in the side view once thing you'd want to make sure that the next time around, the next time you draw them in those views that once again, that consistency is there. I'm going to go around and add in the final hair for the sides of the head. Still might divide that up a little bit more. Again, I'm trying to give the hair some movement, some liveliness to it. You can see especially here on the sides of the head, I'm using this line of beauty. It's a wavy S-like curve, which seems to have an appealing energy to it. When you incorporate it into your drawings. This same shape can be applied to the overall pose of your character. It can be applied to design elements that you've incorporated into them. It can be really applied to many, many different aspects of your drawing, including the overall composition. It's a very natural movement for the hand make. And I guess the reason that it's got so much energy to it is because it's moving the entire way through. There's no point at which it straightens out. It's a line that encompasses movement. It's curving in a different direction the entire way along its trajectory. Okay, so that completes this first set of examples that we've drawn up here. We'll go around the far side of his forehead and just to find the outline for it before we wrap it up. But once more, I would like to do before we oldest 100% done is just to show you a variety of different facial features and whatnot, as we did with the noses that you could potentially go with these head customizations. We've got the jaw line here. And the jaw line could either be triangular, like so. It could be extremely triangular depending on how far you would like to push it. You have a very tiny little chin, very, very sharp chin. You can have a square jaw line. The very broad chin. It have square jaw line. With very narrow chin. You can have a long jaw line, or you could have a very squashed and short jaw line. As for eyes. Well, we could have round eyes with like bags underneath them if you wanted to. You could have very narrow eyes. Be intimidating looking eyes like this. He could have sad looking eyes. Or you could also say call laziness and I, as I guess. And you could have, I guess, similar to sad eyes but more like an old person's eyes, like an elderly person, where the top of the eye is actually hanging over the opening quiet a lot like this. I would also work and there's a lot of different eyes that you could come up with here. There's an endless amount and endless variety of different types of ears. Oh yeah, for sure. So you can have oriental eyes. So something that looks a little bit more like this. This is, again, everybody's going to have their own interpretation. This is how I would draw them. It's subtle. The thing about oriental eyes is you're not always going to necessarily want to, at least in terminus of idealization, you don't necessarily want to define that top eyelid decrease in the top eyelid too much. Because most typically what you'll find is that it's not as prominent. And also the oriental eyes are typically quite dark as well. So you may want to go ahead and add in some additional shading to them as well. And you know, you might have an eyebrow up here. So here again, you've got different types of males. So you could have a pocket mouth amount that sits higher but is smaller in width. This something like this, where the top lip is maybe a little larger than the bottom lip. You'd have a mouth that's very broad, but still sits a little higher. And I find that this can be quite cool for characters or grimacing. And maybe they might have a larger bottom lip. You can even mess around with this bottom underside muscle around the base of the muzzle. The mouse that's, you know, kind of curled up at the sides. And these almost just like facial expressions and sometimes the lines can be blurred a little bit. But you've likely seen people in real life that have some of these variations incorporated into them. I just know someone whose mouth curls up at the sides. It almost looks like they got a little smirk going on most of the time. So there's, there's lots of different types of faces that you can go for. You can customize each and every single part of them. And even the chin, right? Like you could I have abroad. Separate separated chin like this. You'd have a skinny one. Like this. You could have square, smooth 11, etcetera. Get inventive with it. See what you can come up with, and try to create heads that sometimes, maybe not always, but sometimes travel outside of that idealized model that we commonly see within comic books. 3. Pixie: Alright, let's do a female head next. Just to mix things up a little bit. And we'll have her facing in the opposite direction to the previous example. So start out with the cranium once more and will place her on the three-quarter angle as well. Giving our hair to be more of a three-dimensional representation. Hello, then again, if we had her facing directly at us, we might get a better look at how much we can tweak and modify the head shape itself, like the jaw line and whatnot. So you know what, I'm actually going to face her looking directly at us because I think that'll that'll illustrate the head shape. Tweaks that we're going to make quite vividly play in the horizontal guideline that'll wrap around the middle of the sphere. And then we'll draw another one that's running straight down from the top to the bottom of the cranium. Next up, we'll chop off the sides of the head, will drop off an even amount on either side. What you'll typically see on an idealized head. And the way in which we will get the narrowness and the broadness of the face shape itself is we'll just, we'll go ahead and we'll tweak the idealized length of what we might see on the face as we drop it down from the sphere to the chin. So for this one, the previous head example, I ended up going for more of a longer looking face with a square jaw line. So for this one we'll do the exact opposite. Will only drop face down just a little bit. So it'll actually be quite a round face and will make her jaw line quite pointy. So I'm going to run the sides of her jaw line down on an angle, tapering them inward. And this tapered jaw line effect is actually quite feminine in terms of the way in which it looks. We can set the corners of the jaw quite high here as well. Then will lead them down into the chin. And what this leaves us with is a very pointed bottom half of the face. So you can imagine the kind of personality this character might have. And that's what's so amazing about these variational, these varied heads, is that you're able to push certain personality traits through the visual representation of the way in which the head is drawn. And I think we can turn this character into an elf. She's got an elvish type face already. So in order to do that, I'm going to give her pointed ears. And I'll just I'll roughly outline their shape to begin with here. There we go. Oh, like maybe a bad head or something like that. Who knows? Some kind of creatively head. You can see you don't have to change a lot to add a little bit of strangeness to the head that you're drawing. Something that's just a little bit different. Now as far as the facial feature placement goes, we can lay her nose in a little bit lower this time around and actually bring her mouth up. So now her mouth and her nose are quite close together, which was again quite different to the previous head that we drew up. And as far as the eyes go, will actually lay them in just a little bit lower than last time as well. So she'll end up with as a result of very large looking forehead. As for the hairline, Let's go with something, something that's interesting. Maybe one that arches up. So rather than having it runs straight across will curve it up around the top of the head here. So it'll drop straight down around the sides. But then we'll, we'll draw in an arched defining contour for it around the top. And what I'm, what I'm also going to do is maybe even sketch out a little bit of a really, really rough idea for what the hairstyle is going to be here. And I'll develop this further as I bring the head through to completion. But for now, I'm just going to go for something like that. So like a bit of an ice cream head. Quite large hair there. You can see I'm very, very lightly laid that in. There's not a whole lot to it at this point except for an extremely basic shape. And now I'm going to lay in a very thin neck. So it's thin, it's tiny stuff very thick. Yeah, this character could very well be an elf. And I think indeed that I'm going to go for that particular appearance. And our elves are great because you can really get a lot of interesting accessories incorporated in there as well. Like could give her a bit of a crown or I'm not sure what you would call it, but like a necklace that runs around the top of her forehead, place around her neck, some nice big earrings. Anything really? So what I'll do for this one is I'm going to give her quite large eyes, but set further apart. So make them nice and round. So this character is actually going to be a nice character. One that's friendly looking. You can see me outlining the eyes here very lightly. Establishing where they're going to go. And just so much uniqueness added into this character already. I'm trying to maintain the symmetry is as much as I possibly can because we are. That's one tricky thing about drawing a character directly from the front is always capturing that symmetry. I'm not very good at it. I tried to be, but I usually can't completely nail it and just pretend to try to get it looking at this as symmetrical as possible. Alright, next up, as for her eyes, well, we can really mess around with the shape of the eyebrows here. So I'm going to have them arching all the way up. And I'll give them an interesting shape, as interesting as I can possibly make it. Here we go. So really try to have fun with these heads. As I said, there's not a whole lot of, they don't have that. They don't seem to have as much pressure as the idealized heads if you're trying to make them the exact measurements and whatnot, you can come up with some very quirky looking characters using this. We'll even draw in like a different kind of nose here. Okay, so this, this may not even be a human nose. I mean, it's, it's follows a similar structure. But I want to almost make it look like a little bit more creatively. So maybe it's a noise that the nostril openings slightly sitting higher than they otherwise would be. More like a, like a, like an animal snout, but much more cute because this is a kind of cute looking character. As for the mouth, we're going to draw a very small looking mouth. See something that looks a bit more like this. And rather than going on, you know, being pointed up like that, I think I'll have her mouth. I'm pointing downward. What's not knit typically, a mouth shapes that I usually go for. So I think it could look interesting here. It looks like she's smiling now, but I think that works quite well. Alright, and that's the basis of their head design hopefully going to be going with this example. So let's start defining it. The fine and then refine. So I'll begin by drawing the outline of the eye-opening. And then of course, on drawing those up beautiful big eyelashes that I want to give this character in just a moment. First things first, we need to get that eye-opening defined. I'm darkening up my line. I am adding just that little bit more pressure to it. Even though I'm working digitally, digitally. I treat it very much like a regular lead pencil. Also indicate the eyelid as well. Okay, so we'll draw in the top fold. Of the upper eyelid, creases up against the top ridge of the eye socket itself. And now we'll get those eyelashes drawn in a, I'm going to go for some very big thick eyelashes here. I'm going to really push them. Michael Turner style. I'll outline them first. Then once I've got them nicely outlined, fill them in. No matter what it is I'm drawing, whether I'm drawing eyelashes or eyebrows or the jaw line, I tried to go for a strong shape, a strong vivid silhouette. Silhouettes of very important to capture within your art in your drawings. This is the basic shape for the eyelashes. If I wanted to add a little bit more texture to them. Of course, I could go around to these corner areas and I could just add in an extra eyelash strand, which would increase the hair-like appearance of them. That would work quite well. I could even add in another one. The top eyelash like so. Very beautiful looking eye there. We'll go ahead and do the exact same thing on the opposite eye. You can see what an incredibly different vibe this head has in comparison to the previous head. It feels different. This character has a very different personality. Even though we haven't seen him speak or move around or interacted with them in any way. It's just the visual representation of them that we've got to go off. There's such a different feeling to this character in comparison to the previous one. So that's where the power of this stuff really comes into play and really highlighted. So I would say think about the character that you're drawing. Who are they? Are they a strong angry character? Are they a strong Dolby character? You know, you're going to want to incorporate some visual cues into their representation that allows those traits, those character traits to come across. There's a reason that we can look at this character here and assume she's probably going to be an elf of some kind. That's what makes drawing characters so fun, is it's not just about the technical ability sometimes and drawing the perfect head. About how much character can you push into the, into their design, into their representation? How real Can you make them feel? That doesn't always come down to accuracy, that comes down to the amount of life you incorporate into them. Okay, So next up, let's go ahead and actually place in the iris and the pupil. So here we can mix things up again. So we can draw in a bit more of a snake I almost so it will start out with the iris and then add in some, some slits for the pupil. Which will give the snake, I like effect. Again just to, just to create something different here that we haven't yet tried out or seen before. Of course, you could also go for a frog. I know where they've got their pupils kinda running across in the opposite in a 90 degree direction to this. Bring their length up a bit. And I could add in some rendering around the eye is here two is to suggest some shading. And what I do in order to render out the IRS here is I outline the areas that I would like to shade. I start to add in some random lines within that area. And those render lines are very fine, very smooth. There's certainly not thick in any way and I would say render lines in general, you should keep hatches. You should keep them quiet, thin, very, very thin. Thinner you keep them. The more of a range you've got to work with essentially of time. You could very easily increase the darkness of that tone by thickening the mapping if needed. Next, I'm going to define the contours around the top of the eye, which describes the eyelid form. And I'm adding in some very light render lines around this area. And all it really is is a doubling up of the outline that I've established. So if I lay in this outline here and then I added a slightly lighter line around the outside of it. That's enough to give it that additional depth. Especially on a character like this. We can thicken up the top of the iris here to increase the line weight. Add some dimension to the line. You get that polished appearance. That's what line weights really allow you to do, is add a polished appearance to your artwork. I'll also erase some of the underlying construction lines that I placed down initially around the mouth and around the jaw line just to clean it up and give clarity to the stuff that I want to refine here and polish up. Once that's done, it's time to attend to the eyebrows. So I'll run around the outside shape that I've initially laid in for the eyebrows. I'm still keeping the lines thin, but I am darkening it up somewhat. Setting it in stone. Deciding on which of those rough outlines I want to go with. Using what will we remain present within that final presentation. Now I'll add in those eyebrow texture lines. What's interesting is you might accidentally come up with a new design for the next character that you're going to place into your comic book. For example. I hadn't, again, I had no idea that I was going to come up with this particular character. But now that I have, who knows what stories I could write for her? What adventures this character might go on. Next up, I'm going to go ahead and lay in the opening of her nose. Rather define it. I would say basically going over the top of what I already went over before. Next, I'll lay in a darker outline around the middle of her mouth. Will that outline out? So the corners? Again, it's all about making those line weights and the key areas in order to add dimension to your line drawings. As far as adding line weights to render lines and hatching? I don't know that I do that anymore. I usually just I've laid those hatches in very, very quickly, very, very thinly, and I leave the line waiting to the primary outlines that will define the drawing rather than the rendering. Now if you look at David Fincher, his work, he will tend to actually add line weights to his hatches as well. So it's certainly a look that you can go for if so desired. It all depends on the aesthetic that you would ultimately like to capture within your final illustrations. Okay, so that is a mouth. Now, the other thing that I would like to do here is actually give her some black lipstick or some just some darker colored lipstick to show you how that might look. I'm going to outline some little reflections within her lips first. And then once I've gone ahead and done that, I'm going to lay in some shading. And by shading, I just mean some edges will run around the outside of her lips and vary in terms of the amount of time that is being placed down. So up toward the top edges of her bottom lip, you'll notice that they get a little bit darker. And especially around the top lip, I'm going to increase. The darkness of the tone. Is light is going to be, well, there'll be very little light around this area, basically. Okay, Wonderful. Next up, I'm going to define the outline for her jaw. We'll go around the outside and because this is a female character, I am going to, well, I'm still going to keep those lines somewhat rigid, but I am going to try to incorporate more of a softened look as well. I'm still keeping them straight, but I guess I'm adding more corners in there to add some softness to it. Rather than making them completely round. Which is definitely a pro, an approach you can take. I just feel like rounded lines aren't as vivid or is energetic. Certainly smoother, and maybe even more relaxing to look at. Arguably. There we go. As far as any additional detail that we might add to the face here. I'm just gonna leave it as that because there is not only a female character, but it looks like a somewhat more youthful female character. And so you certainly don't want to add any details to a face which has some youthful vitality to it or it's supposed to anyway. So we'll leave it as is at this point. Can be so easy to overdo a face such as this, which simply doesn't require that much detail at all, even, even for more complicated and intricate comic art styles. Right? Now, before we start outlining the ears, what I'm going to do is incorporate some earrings, some interesting jewelry we might be able to describe. Now maybe she's some kind of elf princess or something like that. Alright, and we'll do that on both sides of the ears. What you'll notice is on constructing the design of her earrings out of very basic shapes to begin with. And those larger basic shapes are going to provide the readability. Was a design. Any additional details I add in will provide the surface texture for those larger design elements. Around the top of her head. I'm going to give her a crown. And I'm not I'm not sure if the ground is really what I'm after here. But just like, I guess like a small crown, this to make it look like royalty. Can even visual elements such as the kind of fashion that you're carried away. Whereas we'll see a lot about them. I mean, it says a lot about us the way in which we dress. So it's certainly something that you can take advantage of. When it comes to designing your own characters. Because we are drawing her from the front, it's somewhat easy to come up with a symmetrical design as well. Now I do want to design of crayon to somewhat mimic the design of her earrings so that they look like the part of the same design. Alright, that's good. And we'll leave it at that. I think that looks pretty good. So now we can go ahead and outline the shape of her ears. And I'm going to follow the general outline for them. But I'm also going to tweet, tweet that outline and build upon it. A basic shape is down, that's all good. Well, but then you also want to make it somewhat interesting. And even though we've changed up the shape of the ear could significantly here, it's still going to follow the same structure. It's still going to have the same anatomy. At least the way in which I'm going to be designing it. As much as you might add uniqueness to your phases. They still can't be so unique that they no longer look real. They need to still make sense. In other words, when I look at her ERA, I need to be able to tell that what I'm looking at is indeed an ear, that, that's what it's supposed to be. And ears, they have a certain visual structure to them, a visual representation, visual cues that the audience is going to clue in on and allow them to be able to interpret them as such. Those visual cues aren't there or they're not properly represented, then that's when you end up creating a disconnect with the audience when they become lost in translation. And I've said this before, but you never want your viewer to be confused at all. You want them to always be able to tell almost instantly what it is they're supposed to be looking at. As sad as that sounds. Oftentimes we think about art and we think about how it's supposed to be deep and meaningful. But in most cases, at least as far as commercial art is concerned, you, I want to be thinking along those lines if you want your work to be somewhat more generic and cliche. Because a cliche, it really is just an already preexisting bucket of ideas that people relate with, that they understand that they know. Associations that they can make to your art. That allowed them to relate it to something else that they're already familiar with. And in reality, we don't really like completely new things because something completely new is strange to us. We don't like strange things. We'd like to be familiar with what it is, we're experiencing, what it is we're taking in. Hi guys, This is, this is head design here, what we're doing today in this lesson. Alright, great. So we've drawn in her ear and I'm sure those ears aren't symmetrical, but this symmetrical enough stent tell anybody they're not completely symmetrical. See, that's the thing. And this works both ways. Your artwork might look, might be completely and accurately structured. But if it doesn't look right, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how well-structured it is, doesn't matter if you took every step and executed a perfectly. It's drawing is wrong. Likewise, even if you didn't follow the rules completely to the t, if it looks right, and then that's all that matters. Just needs to look right? I think you as the artist, it's your responsibility to develop your eye enough. Figure out when it looks right in, when it looks wrong. That's the biggest challenge. Now I'm going through and I'm drawing in the jewelry that we designed for her face before her earrings. And later in a moment. Crown. I know is that it's got another name. I just tiara. I guess. Is it a tiara? Maybe. Sometimes my vocabulary isn't the best. Unfortunately, it's because I do more drawing than reading. Growing in these little tiny details. I'm just, again, I'm refining what I laid down and trying to make it look like something. Omega look intentional. These random shapes that I've used to construct her earrings with. Most of the time. If you end up scoring a gig where you have to draw a character's face. Maybe you've gotta do a portrait of them or some sketch cards. Then they will likely be already pre-existing design that you're working off of. When you're commissioned to draw a character. Usually that doesn't mean that you're going to be designing it as well, unless that's what the job entails. I said is indeed part of the commission. But at least if you are asked to do a design, you'll know how to do it based on the given brief that you receive. Now we'll draw an outline for head and neck. And we could also go ahead and add in some jewelry for head and neck. So we'll quickly sketch that in. We'll keep this simple, nothing too complex. Lightly sketch it in to begin with. Again, trying to incorporate some of the same design architecture that we placed into the earrings and into her tiara. This little jewel right in the middle of her necklace that I'd like to render out of a so slightly, we'll add in a bit of a reflection to it. In a series of hatches. Add some tone and some contrast. And then I think we can leave it at that. Finally outlining the neck here. And really the neck on a character like this is pretty much just going to remain as an outline for maybe a small indication of the collarbone or the intersection at which the neck muscles around the sides connect into the collarbone. Wonderful. Next up. But to tend to the tiara. Going to give it a nice thick outline around the bottom. Because of course, this bottom section will not only be possibly casting a shadow, a slight shadow over the forehead that just as the hair would. But it's also going to have a little adding thickness to that outline. We'll give it some depth. It will make it look like it's popping, popping off the top of the head. A little bit of shadow would be collecting underneath that. As I run the contour for the tiara around the top of the forehead. I'm trying to describe its curve. I want to add some dimension to the head here. And the TR is actually helping me to be able to do that. Every contour that you add, as long as it's running around that surface, that rounded surface, it's describing it. You could fill up your entire sketch book with an endless amount of different head variations. You can have a sketchbook dedicated just to that. And I think that by messing around with the measurements of the head will just like anything else, you'll become better and better at coming up with variations that look very appealing. That loop maybe even better in some cases than the idealized proportions. The other thing that ends up coming through is a certain level of stylization. You end up really getting to know your own artistic identity. What, what represents you as an artist? What kind of phases in particular that you most enjoy drawing, the most enjoy representing your characters as I can take a very long time defined, especially if you've only ever drawn the idealized head proportions, your characters. But sometimes breaking beyond that. And going on a little bit of an adventure with your art. It can be an enlightening experience. This is when you get very unique outcomes for the look of your art. And thus in the end, how people recognize you as an artist, how they recognize your rod and relate it to you. Of course, I can come down to the amount of rendering you use and the quality of your lines and that kind of thing. But it's also, again, it's that stylization. It's the little creative decisions that you make when it comes to drawing that no one else makes decisions that are unique to you. And they're going to come about when you're thinking about it the least. In all honesty, when you're not self-monitoring, when you're just really enjoying the process. Okay, Wonderful. So next up, let's attend to her hair and actually start to break it up a little bit. I know that her hairline is going to be sitting here just above the tiara. And as I lead the head down into the hairline, I'm going to try to I'm going to try and split it off from that hairline so that what we end up with is actually darker tones or darker representation of tone around the base of her hair. So let me show you what I mean by that. These strands that I'm adding in these divisions that I'm placing down into the hairdo itself. You'll see that I'm having them. I'll be I'll be drawing them down into the hairline, but then they'll merge, essentially split apart at the base of the hair here, as you can see. I could do the same thing on this one here. And so what ends up happening is you get more lines happening around base of the hairstyle, around the hairline, which makes the hairline itself and appear more defined as an effect. Now I'm starting to add in way too many lines there, so I'm just going to tone it back a little bit. And this is one thing that can happen very easily. You can take it too far with the amount of detail you add into the hair. So be very careful of falling into that trap. Like I fold into it a lot as you can probably imagine. So what I'm going to do is make a very conscious effort to ensure that I am reserved with the amount of splits that I make within the hair here. I'm also, as I was saying before, this is not unlike the eyebrow strands that we were placing into the eyebrows, the eyebrow shape. So you can see we've got some doubled up lines here. We've got a single line coming down here. I added another one base of the hair there. Yet I'm trying to figure out what lines do I actually need here to make this piece look more complete? And it's probably not as many as I would think. Or as I would initially attempted to do. Again, trying to get that nice S curve happening in the hair. That nice energy. Alright, so I've got enough lines there to give it a good amount of volume without over detailing it. And you'll know when you've overdone it because it'll just look too busy. It'd be won't have that clean, stylized look that comes with a more optimal amount of appeal. You have to erase part of the line and redraw it in there for a smoother result, then so be it. I do it all the time. What these contours do that I'm laying in now is a just allow you to describe the flow of the hair. The trajectory that it's folding itself into. Less is more. Remember that freak out about over detailing it because you really don't need to start adding in some more contours around the base. Remember that these contours actually serve as subtle shading as well. And because there's going to be less light received at the bottom of the hair then at the top where the light source is going to be projecting down onto the character from. Well, that means that you're going to see lighter tones toward the top of the hairstyle and towards the bottom. Which means most of these lines that I'm adding in need to reside around the base of the hairstyle or towards the middle and towards the top, we're left with less detail. Let's contours. Still visions. Alright, so I'm going to continue making my way around the hair here. The other thing that you'll find is that if you start adding too much detail into the hair, is it just takes forever to do it. It doesn't lead to good results in the end anyway, he spent all this time detailing the heck out of the hair, rendering it and whatnot and in the edit, that doesn't even matter. Fact, it did you deserve as spending all that time both in terms of the final presentation and in the amount of energy and time you put into it. So for hair, I would recommend looking at artists such as Jay Scott Campbell, beans, Bennis. There's also another guy that I looked at on Deviant Art back in the day. He has a bit of a weird username. I'm not sure exactly what his real name is. But his username on Deviant Art was squirrel shaver. Yes, That's why squirrel shaver. Hence, he would draw a lot of female characters. But here's the way in which he depicted here is pretty much what I'm emulating here. Essentially it, it changes the way in which I did here completely and really helped me to make sense of it. Because before that my hair would just be very messy, very over detailed. Look, i'm I'm only adding in a few lines here, but it looks detailed enough at this point. It's it's looking very detailed in comparison to everything else I've added into this piece. So again, you don't need a lot. It's all about heat. I suggesting detailed more than actually adding it in there most of the time. Okay. Under form. So for the most part finished her hair. Now it's time to go around the base of the hairline and adding a few more of those divisions. Like I said, just to make the hairline look more defined. This is how I approach it. Basically see that it's just a matter of splitting it off. He heard of split ends before. That's sort of what I'm doing here, I guess. As I get closer toward the bottom of the hair, I'm either adding an additional lines or I'm splitting off new lines from already existing ones. And that's simply, it darkens the tone toward the base while also adding in that texture or lending toward the direction of flow of the hair. And you can see that there is a certain amount of liveliness to the hair. It feels textual. It's got movement to it, It's got volume to it. And you want that within the hair of your characters that you can add so much to them. Try to be as patient as you can be with your art. It's not always going to go as fast as you want it to. Especially when you go out on your own and do this stuff and you don't have to follow along and you've got the time to actually sit there and put the effort in, take that opportunity. Even if you spent a whole day on a single head, it's fine. Do that. As long as you're having fun with it and as long as you're happy with that end result and it's the best that you could do at the time. That's what matters the most. Especially when you're learning this stuff, There's no time limit. You're not trying to beat the deadline. Yeah. Of course, is there's an importance on making sure that you're able to do this stuff fast when you're getting when you're doing a commission and you've got a deadline to keep two, or you're doing a full comic book. And you gotta get that done. Because it's, it's scheduled to release at a certain time. But that's, that's when you're working. That's very different from actually learning and studying and taking the time to harness your skill set. You need time to be able to do that. So don't rush it. Wonderful. Then once that's been added in, you can actually erase the hairline that you roughly defined before and just the fact that there's additional renderings there, it'll suggest that that's a fairly hard hairline anyway. And you can even you can even go ahead and add some additional lines in there. If you really want to create a more of a defined representation of the hairline, which I'm going to do right now. So you can see that around the top of the hairstyle, there's very minimal amount of detail around the base. However, it really starts to ramp up. Now. Over here around the eye and the ears around his sideburns. I want to make sure that I've added in some rendered hair as well. Forget that. A beautiful, fabulous do some erasing. And the last thing I'm going to do is as polish up some of the line weights. Okay, So I want to give this overall hairstyle At nice vivid outline. So I'm going to go over the top of it on more time and I'm just going to darken it up. Interior stuff. It's fine. I don't really need to touch it. I want those render lines to be fairly thin and elegant and subtle anyway. But as far as the actual shape is concerned, the outside shape, that outside contour we would call it. I want to make that nice and vivid. And in fact, if you get this right, you're able to capture a good shape, a good outline for whatever it is you're drawing. It could be an arm, it could be a leg, it could be ahead. Then, you know, that's, that's probably one of the most important aspects of creating a solid drawing. I've found that it just adds so much. Leave out the rendering, you leave out everything else. So the interior details. And if you've got a good shape going on, and it can be a total game changer for your artwork. I've heard professional artists like Shelby Robertson, for example, worked with Rob Life Field. He said the same thing. And it's something that he always tries to focus on. And even if you don't get the rest of it right, if you get if you nail that shape, doesn't really matter. If you screw up things on the interior. If you screw up anything on the interior silhouettes. Does the same thing for her ear, will polish that up, give it a nice outline he could find and vivid and nice to look at. And it just creates a more polished, professional looking presentation. That's what I've found. That's what line weights have given my work. That was the biggest change that I noticed in everything. Just looked much more professional. Looked at a much higher quality than before. Before. Without the line weights, you could say my work was amateur. At least it it appeared amateur. It's so weird just what an effect, what an impact line weights can have on your stuff. So certainly experiment with them, see what you can achieve with them. Like for example, if we really wanted to add some dimension to this neck clays, check this out. All we need to do is to add in a slightly thicker line weight underneath this lower edge of the top structure. The same thing around the bottom. And that would just bounce it right up off of the neck. It would give it that three-dimensionality. Same with her tiara. We can really thick in that outline up if we wanted to. Same with the ridge of the frame, airframe ahead and do the same thing. They're just about outlining the major shapes that make up these areas. Now that we've done that, I think that that just about rounds up this head demonstration. 4. Bearded Elder: We'll start out with a sphere. Just as before. Roughly draw it in there lightly. I've got a very loose grip on my stylus. I'm not pressing hard at all and pressing very lightly on the page. I'm not really pressing at all, honestly. There's not a lot of pressure being applied to the stylus right now, because I want to keep it light, as light as possible. A drawing, my horizontal guideline that wraps around the equator of the sphere. And I'll draw in the center line. I don't represent the front of the face runs from the top of the sphere to the bottom. Then we'll lay on the side planes, creating the temporal areas of the skull, flattening them out. And we can even go ahead and chop off a little bit of the far side of the cranium to just to make sure this is an even amount of space on either side of the front of the face here. Next, we'll drop at the front of our face down to the chin. And for this one, we're going to drop it down a little longer. It will drop it all the way down to here. Next up we'll draw in the jaw line. And for this one, I'm going to set the corners of the jaw up quite high and then the chin down a little lower. And it'll be less broad as well. So I want it almost to come down into a point, but I didn't want it to be a sharp point. There's going to be a little bit of a taper to the sides of the jaw. Then as they transitioned down into the chin, again, you get this sort of pointed appearance here that I'm lightly sketching in for the jaw line shape. I might even set the corners of joy a little higher. In fact, come to think of it. I'm just looking at this and coming up with a design here is I work. So now that I've got the jaw line placed in, and by the way, as we age, not a whole lot is necessarily going to happen to our jaw line, at least stylistically at comic style format. We do lose it a little bit in reality, however, especially if we start putting on weight, That's kinda been happening to me lately. As I, as I get older. And it's a bit of a challenge to maintain that sharp jaw line. I'm sure we've all come up against that battle. But when it comes to comic book, usually the juul line is one area that you're going to want to try to, especially in a more stylized appearance, try to capture as, as vividly as you can. Next up, we'll place in the facial features starting with the ears actually. Well, actually, let's go ahead and place down the eyes first. So I'm going to set the eyes in about the middle of the head here. Maybe about here. Then what I'll do is I'll draw in the nose. And one thing that you'll find with as you get older, especially for men, is that your nose will grow longer. Okay, So it kind of keeps on growing. For this guy is, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna drop it down to a bad idea. We're going to exaggerate it a little bit and we'll put the mouth around about there. Okay. Wonderful. The other thing that also grows bigger is your ears. Okay, So they grow droopy ear and we will probably, we can bring those are all the way down really. Okay, so bigquery is bigger, knows everything. It tends to start sagging a little bit. You'll lose muscle mass around your neck. So for an older character, it's kinda like for younger character you going to have a thinner neck for an older character. Same deal. You'll, you'll end up with a thinner neck. And because your muscles are slightly weekend, you'll get a bit more of a hunched forward neck as well as the neck needs to put in more effort to hold up the weight of your skull. Alright, once that's done, we can attend to the hairline. As for the hairline, well, you know what, Let's let's have that all the way receded. It will draw a little bit of hair around the sides here, I'll sketch that in. But for the most part, we'll leave the top completely blank because we haven't, we haven't drawn a bold character yet. Wonderful. So now that we have. The facial features plotted out and where are we going to place them? I'm going to draw in the facial planes. When a lightly sketch out the outer shape of the far side of the face as well. Notice I'm giving the character more pronounced cheekbones because that's what tends to happen as you get older. And now we're ready to lay in the facial features beginning with the eyes. Now, for an older person's eyes, what you're going to want to usually try to indicate visually is the top upper eye area actually drooping down over the top of the eye opening. We're going to add that in there because all of the muscles and I know this sounds a little bit depressing, but who will the muscles and whatnot are going to get the Zagier and weaker. And so that's why things start to adhere to gravity a little more. What I'm gonna do here is indicate that starting with the eye-opening and then central waiting that shape as I start to lay in the final outline later on. So this is the underside of the brow that's sitting on top of the eye here, essentially now. And the eyebrow thus will be pulled down low at two. And the other thing about eyebrows is, as we get older, especially as men, our eyebrows grows thicker. Everything grew. More hair everywhere. Growing out of your ears, growing Eddie and knows. Yeah, definitely thicker eyebrows there. A little bit brush here as well. See some some older gentleman and now their eyebrows are growing over the top of their eyes. It's crazy. Like my grandfather in-law. That's certainly the case with him. Okay. Wonderful. So now that we've drawn the eyebrows and let's go ahead and get that noise drawn out. And this is where we're going to see that longer older gentleman knows. And you'll notice just because it's so long here. He looks older already. Just from the way that we've shaped the eyes, shaped the nose. And we haven't even added in any wrinkles yet or any additional details. As for the mouth, we're going to draw that out. And I'm going to draw somewhat of a, I guess a sad or droopy are looking mouth here. It's like a sad old man, but a little bit depressing, but that's okay. I'm going to add some shape to his chin which will add the Be it onto. Just as with the hair, I'm going to draw out a general style. All the beer that I would like to go for. That is after I go ahead and start erasing some of the construction outline width. Well, I'm going to erase the construction outline and try to clean things up a little bit with the eraser. Here. There we go. More pronounced cheekbones, more pronounced. Mouth, muzzle. Everything becomes a little bit more pronounced. As you get older. Those sunken in cheekbones happening. And also some bags underneath the eyes here. Roll those out. I want to give them a bit of a puffy appearance. Actually. There we go. And we'll draw in a folder around the mouth here to there we go. And you can see that I'm starting to define in fact, some, some more of the contours that describe the underlying anatomy of the face in a sense. Also go ahead and start to sketch out some of the folds that you might see around the forehead. Around the brow. Very lightly sketching those out. Now. And you can see now it's looking really old. Next up, let's add in that beard in very lightly sketching it in there. Trying to define its shape first and foremost, being very light with it being very rough. I'm trying to give it a time sense of flow. Now we talked about hair ribbons before, so I'm going to try to incorporate those into his his side where they're even incorporate them into his bed too. And I'm going to continue adding in the his beard or around the sides of his his jaw around along his jaw line. I'll do go ahead and do some erasing as well. Getting rid of the water or the underlying outline that I define the dual width initially. And that's how I'll lightly drawn in a old dude head. Alright, so next, let's define the outline for his eyes. Line weights. What I'm doing here is I'm running my pencil along the lighter outline that I placed down initially. And in certain areas I'm sticking it up and and other areas, I'm sending it out. The areas where I'm thickening up that outline, I'm making it heavier is usually around the corners. You'll notice up here in the upper corner of the eye. I've ended up at the outer corner of the eye. I've also taken it up and even around the tear duct I might seek and it up as well. In the middle running along the edge of that outline. Usually it thins out a little bit more, but it's still quite defined as well. So let's go ahead here and outline the eyebrow now. Depending on the light setup, that can also determine where the line weights are going to be placed. For example, if my light sources projecting down onto the character from above, then I might thicken up the outline of the bottom edge of the eyebrow to subtly suggests that. I'll go ahead now and add in some lighter render lines to describe the texture of the eyebrows here. And you'll notice that I'm not making these completely straight. Actually going ahead. And i'm I'm adding that S curve to the eyebrow. Drains separations because I want to create a brushy look for the eyebrows on this small, elderly character. I'm making those lines curved. I'm trying to make them random as well, or randomized. Sometimes I want to go in and I'll actually want to thicken up the render lines within the eyebrow, believe it or not. As I add in the line weights, I'm applying more pressure. But it's a very controlled amount of pressure. So I know that I can press lightly. I know is that I can press hard and that there's a lot of different pressures, levels of pressure in between those points. So I'm gauging based upon the line that I'm drawing in exactly how much pressure that needs to be. So what would that requires some times is getting to know the tools that you're working with and what pressures you are able to apply it to get the result you're looking for using that tool because every tool is different. But even more than that. How our levels of pressure on what we consider to be pressing down hard and what we consider to be pressing down light is different too. Okay. So when I say I press down light, I mean, ideally even only just touched the tablet with my pencil. I press down hard. That May be just pressing down light for you guys. So again, be looking at trying to correlate the amount of pressure you are applying to your tablet with the line that you're seeing on the screen. And trying to recall what kind of line you're able to achieve based upon that pressure. Then the next time around you, you've got that subconscious understanding of what you need to do, what amount of pressure you need to apply in order to capture the line you're looking for. Now, the eye sockets. I'll want to accentuate here. Because again, this is an older looking character. And so we're going to have those. There's slightly more sunken eyes. And what you'll notice is I'm using some very subtle rendering tactics here, which is basically just laying in a very light shape. That describes the pocket of the eye socket as it's pushed inward. It's a form of rendering, you could say. It's just very subtle and not extremely detailed. Now we've got the folds around his mouth which will place in also generally add in more details around the nose. Again, there's, there's going to be more or folds within the skin here. Character has likely lead a very long life and expressed a lot of emotions throughout it. It's probably a little bit too much detail around his nose actually. It's very easy to go overboard sometimes, just be careful of that. Now I'm going to define the outline of the nose, shape of the nose here. The thicker outline. You'll notice that I'm sort of sketching it in there. Now if I was inking, it wasn't penciled and I was inking, I would try to get it down in one single line. As far as penciling goes, I run back over the line until it says dark and as thick as I would like it to be. Again, usually in the corners are where two lines meet, is where I'll thicken that contour up. In terms of rendering. You could add some hatches. That great aid off of some of these lines. We can start to draw out the beard, be at itself. It's not going to be unlike defining the hair on a character. Very, very similar. And I saw around the mouth, we're going to see or divisions occur because that's the base of the mustache. And you can see the very high level of contrast between the appearance of age between this head and the previous head. There's a significant difference suggested there. It's the additional lines on the face. Of course, it's a number of different things. I'm going to add some more rendering in around the top of the nose. Small cross hatches. We've got the underside of the lip, which we can add in there. And I'll also render that out just a little bit too. Again, increasing the amount of tone within it. Not too much. We don't want to make him look like he's wearing lipstick. But maybe we want to add in some, some eyeliner or eye shadow again just to get that maybe a Viking appearance happening. So go ahead and do that while I'm still remembering, I actually forgot to outline his other riot. Kinda skip the head. I'll do that while I'm at it. But again, there's not really any particular order you need to draw the face. And sometimes you can just go with the flow and do it in your own way. That's totally fine. You could even go ahead and add in some, I don't know what you'd call it, what like Celtic or Egyptian or something. They always used to do like some, some fancy stuff with their eyeliner, adding something like that. Or it could just be a fantasy race of people, like I said, Calderon go from Game of Thrones. Something like this. We'll add in his eyebrow and the opposite side of the face, the far side of the face, outlining its shape. Then we'll bring in that underside of the eyebrow. And I might get rid of these bottom portions of the eye make up there. I think that was really working. Okay. And then we've got now his eye bags will now draw in. Guy, he looked kinda reminds me of myself after a night without much sleep. All right. And now we'll define some of the cheek bones there. On the far side of the face, articulating the shape out of contour in that area. You can see me adding in that line weight just below the bottom here. That contour meets this other line. And again, it just adds so much character. The outline as a drawing. And we can get our cross hatches out here, add some in that running into the cheek bones. They're being sparing with the amount of rendering I'm adding into this, but an older character was a bit more detail. Can always do with it. A wonderful. Next up. Let's continue pouring out characters beard. And we'll bring down these large contours. Start dividing them up in much the same way that we did the hair on the PV previous character. In fact. And you know that the ribbon like appearance that here has usually comes about in this area that I'm about to define. So you'll get the beard curling around the bottom here. And then it'll flip around and you'll see the back of it. Now this is a very stylized approach, but it does illustrate how hair, at least stylistically, is often represented in comic books. You'll notice, rather than sketching in these lines, I'm trying to get them drawn down in one fell swoop. Capturing the energy of the gesture as I lay in that stroke around the top of the beard, you'll notice that I'm adding in those additional levels of detail. That is additional divisions in the beard because that's where it ends. That's the bead line you can think of it as. Then I'll do the same thing toward the bottom of the beard, dividing it up more. As I go. Then you can see that the beard itself has some level of form to it. Thanks to the way in which I've started to lay in what you could think of as render lines. Those render lines also describe the flow, the texture, the volume of the hair, tinea going to divide it up. As I take those lines lower into the form. Then I'll bring the beard up into the cheekbone area on this side, although that would mean that I also need to take it up into that area on the opposite far side of the face. I'll do that as well. Again, we got to make sure everything is symmetrical. Otherwise, it'll just look like his beard is sitting high on one side of the face than the other. Just probably not what we want. Alright. And you'll notice that the beard at it drops down lower than the draw a line. And that's why it's great. Because if you have grown a double chin, you can always hide it with a beard. A beard greatly adjusts the shape of a man's draw a line. It's like male makeup essentially adds contrast to the face. Very, very useful. I'm continuing the same approach, the same pattern along the jaw line, dividing the hair up, defining the shape, the volume, and the flow of it. And I can of course go ahead and define the edge of the cheekbone. One to adding in some render lines. I do. Next up we've got his ear. Now I think what we'll do is actually give him a proper hearing because I haven't shown you how I go about drawing one of those yet. I guess this is what you'd call a hoop earring. Find the shape of vizier after that. Running an outline around its shape. Then I'll follow the process for actually drawing the interior ear anatomy. Adding in that fish hook. We go wishbone or however you want to think of this interior cartilage in the ear hole opening and the arrow whole covering. That just about does it. And of course, you could always add in shadow into an area like this if you wanted. Just to give it that additional dimension in detail. It's not necessary though. The K fantastic. Next up will attend to his hair. The hair, the hair that he has left on the top of his head. Now this is obviously a little easier to draw than a full head of hair, which is really good. And what I'm going to go ahead and illustrate here is that the ribbon effect that air can often follow. Let me get rid of some of these construction lines first. Making things a little hard to look at right now, a little confusing. So again, we'll twist this hair curl around. And this would certainly look good for curly hair. Now I'll start adding in some of those hair divisions as well. You can see that, uh, you know, I've probably made those divisions to even have probably added into many as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and redo that part. The angle that my head, my hand is drawing these honors. It's probably not exactly the best angle. In fact, it might have been easier for me to flip this page around to do this, but I like to challenge myself trying to get that smooth outline happening. And one thing that can help with smooth lines is increasing the level of stabilization in your brush settings. So if you go over here to the side panel in Mongoose, in Clip Studio Paint, get darker pencil. You can increase the stabilization down here. I've got mine set at six right now. If you've got a fairly unsteady hand, stabilization can really help you out. And even if you've got a steady hand, I can still really aid you quite a lot. And being able to just really capture that nice Slowly equilibrium line. Smooth. It smooths that out essentially. Alright, we'll go down to the bottom here. Adding some curls. You've seen more divisions to break the hair up. And again, we can really take our time with this and enjoy the process. Have some fun with it. Take the time to come up with a really beautiful presentation that we can be proud of. I think that time pressure can crush your creativity a little bit sometimes and just make you anxious. So again, if you're working on a commission different story, get it, get it done. But if you're drawing just for yourself, you want to create something spectacular. Try to relax and let it take as long as it's gonna take. It's important to give yourself the space and the time to actually be creative. So now I'm adding some subtle line weights in around the hair to get certain areas of it to stand out. And rather than doing that in a single line weight or a single gesture by hand, I'm actually all my sketching those line weights in on the top. Gradually increasing the thickness and the heaviness as I go. Rather than just doing the outline of the overall hairstyle, I'm actually going in and bringing out some of the main clumps as well. And what that's allowing me to achieve is a layering effect. The above layers appear as though they're sitting further forward or higher up than the lower layers, which are defined with a lighter outline. Now that that's done, I'm going to continue outlining the top of the head. And I'll run that I outlined down into the top of the brow. And you'll notice that I've added some thickness to it. On the opposite side of the head. We'll draw in some hair that we can see poking out. Let's start that up a little bit higher. Actually. Get that Ruben effect happening again. Wonderful. And for the most part, that actually completes this guy's head. Now, to really give it that polish look, we'll do the same thing as we did on the previous head, which is adding a line weights. Make sure everything is nicely defined, as vivid as we possibly can get it. Mostly I'm focused on just the outline. So just the outline of the hair, the outline of the face shape, the outline of the facial features. Adding that line weight variation, thickness, varied thickness to the lines. And sometimes your line weights can just run around the outside shape of a certain area of the face. And that'll do, that will achieve a Polish looking effect. It's just that they serve, they can serve multiple purposes so they can indicate from what direction the light is shining down onto the character from. They can indicate what is sitting further forward. Then maybe some other element. Things which is sitting further forward, such as the top layers of hair, as an example, are going to have a thicker outline. At thicker outline, emphasis emphasizes certain, certain areas within the drawing. Brings attention to them. Holds the eye in those areas first as a focal point. That's why it looks so good to actually outline a particular area of the face that has a lot of minor detail inside of it. That outline kind of encapsulates everything within it and makes it more readable and easier to visually digest. Various, if everything's got the exact same lightweight line weight thickness is very hard for the eye to figure out where it's supposed to be focused and how do we even begin taking in what it's looking at and interpreting it? I'll run this outline along the outside of the beard. And there's a few areas in here as well where I can thicken up the outline and giving it a sense of layering depth. I'm not going to increase the thickness of every outline in here because some of this is just rendering. But the major clumps of beard. I do want to increase the thickness of wonderful this earring. I run an outline around the outside contour of it. All. I'm going to define the outer outline of it anyway. Define the shape of the ear, further. Refining the shape of the hair. Especially around the top where we got this free. We've left this outline very, very light, so close that up with a thicker outline. Again, I'm just kinda sketching it in their thinking, thickening it up as I go to the desired level of heaviness that I'm looking for. How do I know when I've reached it? Well, I'm looking I'm paying attention to what it is. I'm laying down onto the page and if it looks thick enough, then I'm not going to keep going. I'm going to keep on adding thickness to it. It's important to know when to leave it. Sleeve would be when you've done enough. And that goes for rendering. It goes for increasing the weight of your lines, for the amount of detailing you might add in. Now one thing that I didn't really emphasize is the wrinkles on his face. So we'll go ahead and do that now as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and add those in there. Some of these are double lines, some of these are just single lines that I'm placing down. Then every now and then what I'll do is I'll go ahead and I'll actually add in some cross hatches. The areas in which I do that. It really depends like I just added them in that I didn't think they look good. So I take them out. Usually I'll have hatches gray dating into a single line like that. Not necessarily across the line. So at the end of this line, for example, I could put some hatches and that just breaks up the line a little bit. But again, I don't think that looks good. It didn't it didn't suit the level of detail I wanted in that area, so I'm just going to leave it as is. So I'm going ahead here and they sing in more wrinkles on his forehead. And I think that just about does it. Oh, I forgot to place in his pupils and iris. So let's get those drawn in. There we go. The last thing I'd like to demonstrate here before we end this particular demonstration is I'm going to lay in some darker eye shadow on this little elf lady that we've drawn up over to the left. By the way, when it comes to the neck of an, an older character, usually it's a good idea to actually define more of their neck muscles because they are going to be a little bit more visible on the surface of the skin. Okay. There we go. Yep. Thanks so much. Okay. You're very welcome. I really do appreciate it. We'll make it happen. Have a good one. Alright. So, yeah. Alright, final thing that we're going to go over here is the eye shadow of this ELF. So my shadow usually is going to be found around the top eyelid area. And it can just, you know, you can add that extra level of contrast. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to outline a little bit of a reflected area. I'm going to fill in. The rest is black. And as for this reflection area, I'm going to just render that out. Alright, so it's quite easy. You basically just filling in the top eyelid with shadow. Now this can be as simple as just adding in really thick eyelashes, but if that's not enough, this is the next best thing. Go. I don't often add a shadow to my characters. But it's certainly something that you can try out for yourself. If you want to. I might even undo that because I think I like it better without outlier shadow. But yeah, that's how you'd go about it. Let's do another example. Another example of a close up I here, just to make it clearer. If we've got the outline of the eye like so. We've got that top eyelid. You would have the eyelash, of course. Fill in here. We'd have the bottom set of eyelashes. Now there's actually a few approaches that you could take. As I said before, you can go ahead and we can fill in the top eyelid some really dark eye shadow. That even beyond that, you could also go ahead and place in some additional rendering going up into the eyebrow to that would, that would add a lot of darkness around the eyes, of course. But it would also certainly draw a lot of attention to. So it's certainly something to think about as far as makeup is concerned. I mean, there's all different types of makeup out there that that you can look up, of course, that are far more creative than an inventive than what I've just shown you here. Absolutely. You know, you can get makeup which is like really dark around the edges and then lightens up as you make your way up into the brow. But again, I don't know if it's necessary when it comes to the line art itself. I think that may even be something which is best left to your colorist in all honesty. Alright, so that wraps up today's head demonstrations. 5. Assignment: Hey, you've made it, you've got through the lessons of this class and hopefully what you're looking at in front of you, if you've been following along is your own set of unique character heads. And if indeed that is what is looking back at you on the page in front of you. Then you've already completed the assignment for this class. Please do submit it in the project section in order to get feedback, my personal feedback on the work that you've done. Now, if you haven't, it's totally fine. Now's your chance because the assignment for this class, as you probably guessed, is indeed to draw up your own unique character heads. Now you can follow along and draw a similar heads to the ones that have demonstrated throughout this class. Or if you're feeling daring enough, you can use the same mindset, tools and approach that we've talked about throughout these lessons in order to come up with your Arne. And I highly encourage you to be adventurous and to do that just to see what you can come up with because I'm excited to see what you might come up with as well. So of course, once completed this assignment, once again, submit it to the project section of this class in order to get feedback. Good luck, and until next time, keep drawing.