How To Draw Heads & Faces Workshop: Head Shape, Facial Feature & Hair Style Variation | Clayton Barton | Skillshare
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How To Draw Heads & Faces Workshop: Head Shape, Facial Feature & Hair Style Variation

teacher avatar Clayton Barton, Harness the Power of Dynamic Drawing

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      0:26

    • 2.

      Professor Head

      67:14

    • 3.

      Brush Size & Pressure

      1:58

    • 4.

      Female Hair Bun Head

      56:08

    • 5.

      Orc Head

      36:43

    • 6.

      Assignment

      0:37

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About This Class

Are you tired of drawing generic heads that lack variety? Well that's all about to change. Because in this class you'll learn how to draw unique, memorable looking heads that stand out from the crowd - and leave a lasting impression.

Drawing heads and faces with the correct proportions, shape and facial feature placement is one of the first challenges most artists face when learning how to draw characters. With time and consistent practice, most of us master this skill.

But there comes a point where we realize our head drawings are looking rather generic and boring - even though they're technically correct. Our heads wind out looking like cookie-cutter clone domes that lack variety and pizazz.

What happens if we want to set our characters apart from one another? How do we make them look different?

Short answer - we've got to mix it up. But, we've got to mix it up in the right way, taking everything we understand about head proportions, shape and facial feature placement - and modifying them to create head and face variations for our characters that still have a solid structure and look accurate in their own right.

That's what this class is all about. I'll show you the step by step process for creating three unique looking heads. Each demonstration is recorded and narrated real-time, giving you the ability to follow along at a steady pace, and put everything you're learning into practice.

This class teaches you how to:

  • Establish the foundational structure and proportions of a unique head drawing
  • Stretch, squash and shape the face in a variety of different ways
  • Draw alternative sets of facial features
  • Design a range of hair styles
  • Draw head accessories
  • Clean up your head drawings with slick, smooth and sharp line art

When you've completed this course, you'll have an iron clad understanding of how to draw memorable heads that convey personality, intrigue and copious amounts of character. You'll possess the knowledge to design heads far beyond that of the average run-of-the-mill model which adheres to an idealized structure and proportions.

Comic artists, character designers, illustrators, and all other artists across the board, who enjoy drawing or painting people, are sure to benefit from the lessons taught in this class. So buckle in, and get your sketchbooks and pencils ready - Let's begin!

Meet Your Teacher

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Clayton Barton

Harness the Power of Dynamic Drawing

Teacher

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

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

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

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hey, it's Clayton in this class, you're going to be learning about how to draw hairs, but not just regular run-of-the-mill heads. We're gonna be talking about specifically how to come up with different head shapes for your character's facial feature variation, hairstyles, head accessories. And finally, how to capture a nice, polished looking aesthetic for your finished head drawings. Let's jump straight into it. 2. Professor Head: Okay, So I'm going to do up three different examples here. And each one of these examples, I'm going to turn them into individual, unique looking heads. So they're going to look different from one another in many different ways. So the first set that I'm going to do is a male head. And I'm just going to burst up loosely sketch out a sphere onto the canvas. I'm keeping it rough and I'm keeping it light. So light, you may find it a little bit hard to see actually. Then I'm going to lay in the axes. All of these heads will be drawn at an eye level just so that we can take a look at how much their proportions are being affected without the distortions applied to them. We might see if we were to put it into more of a dynamic perspective. Okay, so I've got my vertical axes established. I've got my horizontal equator axes established. Next up, I'm going to lay in the side planes. Here. You'll notice I'm not even going to draw in another vertical axis. Instead, I'm just going to chop away this side plane right away. Alright? So we've drawn that in very lightly. And by the way, when I'm drawing in the side planes, I'm looking at how much space I've got on either side of the sphere. We've got this middle line here. And I know that I've got at least this much space on the far side of the face. And so when I'm drawing on my side plane and I want to know how wide to make it. While I just look at trying to capture an equal amount of space with foreshortening taken into account since it's a three-quarter angle, I tried to capture a similar amount of space on the opposite side. So that'll give me a symmetrical even looking face. In a way, the center line actually determines how large the side planes will be. Let's look at the side plane laid in. I'm going to draw another vertical guidelines straight down the middle of it and then draw out the face. Now, for this face, what I'm going to do is a much longer face than I would otherwise normally draw. So I'm going to take this center line all the way down here. This would be a very exaggerated looking face because it's stretched and different sorts of head shapes are going to, of course, provoke certain feelings and interpretations within your viewer. They're going to feel different ways about these various character representations that you've come up with. Now what kind of jaw line are we going to give this character? Well, that's another good question because you can mess around with the shape of the jaw line a little bit. You can make it a square jaw. You can make it more of a triangular drawer. And I think that given this character has a longer head in general, a triangular jaw might actually work quite well. But we can also choose to make it more interesting by dropping the corners of the jaw down even further. So I'm going to go ahead and do that as well. So you can see that the corners of the jaw all the way down here, whereas normally I would have stopped them at just underneath the sphere. We can mess around with the shape of the jaw itself. So in other words, I can play around with this edge that connects the corners of the jaw to the chin. I could even give him a little bit of an upward raised right in the middle of the chin there. Again, there's all of these different unique characteristics that you can play around with. Then we can drop the jaw down on the other side. I want to try to keep all these changes symmetrical. So I'm going to drop the corners of the jaw on this side of the face down. The same same length, same distance, and make sure that they align. There's lots of different sorts of jaws that you can have. So what I'll do is I'll just do some examples up here really quickly. You could have a square looking jaw like, well. They can you can have a square looking jaw like this. Where we've changed basically you're changing up the angles of the jaw line and also the placement of the corners of the jaw as well. Can draw more triangular if you want. You can make it rounded. You can come up and invent your own jaw lines if you want to. Totally fine. Anything really goes when it comes to character design, what matters is that they look like they're buyer. In other words, characters tend to visually represent who they are supposed to be on the inside. And so if you're drawing a villain, for example, while longer go into looking face is going to work really well. You know, pointed looking nose, scary, green, evil looking eyes. All of that stuff plays into what a villain should look like. And if you give a hero like a good guy, those characteristics people will mistake him for a villain because we all have these visual associations that we create with the characters that we observe. Okay, great. By the way, you don't necessarily have to do exactly what I'm doing here on the screen. I'd encourage you to experiment a little bit. See what kind of shapes that you can come up with for your head. Alright, so once we have got the jaw line place, then we can decide where we're going to place this character's nose. Is he going to have a short nose? Is he going to have a longer nose? Well, I think that in this instance, I might give the character a longer nose. I'm going to place a little dash for it. Lower down towards the chin. As for the mouth, I'm going to place that close to the nose, just underneath it. So he's got a really big nose and a pretty big chin. And the giant jaw. Next step, we'll give him some eyes and I'm going to place the eyes all the way up here. Alright? And you can see that you can always see the character coming through here, even on the basic level of the foundational head that we've drawn the ears. What we'll do is give him some little ears. That'll work quite well. Then as for his hairline and we will be talking about here, here, we can go ahead and do is mess around with the shape of it. So let's see, see what we can come up with here. Maybe a widow's peak hairline. I think that'll work pretty well. That's kind of receding. It's dropping down right there in the middle. That'll work a okay. Except we've got a neck, so it will drop the neck down about there. He doesn't have a super thick neck. He doesn't have a super thin one either. Somewhere in the middle. Okay, Wonderful. So we've got our head drawn out, least the foundations of it. Next, what I'll do is start drawing in the eyes. So just as with the general shape of the face, we can also go ahead and start tweaking the shape that we want to go for with the eyes. So is he going to have little lies or big guy as well? I think what I'll give him is long eyes. And they're going to be kinda droopy and sad looking. I'm going to go for something like this. In a previous lesson, we talked about how the general shape of the eye is essentially a square which has been pushed on its side a little bit. But that's just the standard I. We could come up with so many different variations for that. We could come up with an evil looking eye. And you could argue that these are simply just expressions all the eye. But they can also pass as I shapes. So default, default representations of a character's eye, how they look in an idle position. Okay? You can have round looking eyes and you could have very thin, small looking eyes. Something like that. So mess around with the different combinations that you can come up with for these features. Same with the nose. What I'll do is show you some examples of how we can mess around with the nose. We can have a long nose that is pointy. We could have an inward scoop. No, he's just making names for these up that bends. It bends at E and along the bridge and then comes out at the bottom kind of like a beast and vein knows almost. You could have a nose which is rather square looking. That would work. I know these look very cartoony and stylized, but you can render them out and they can look very realistic. You could have a noise that job straight down. And then the bulb pokes out a little bit at the bottom. You know, good for a younger person's looking, younger person's nose. And as for males, let's take a look at males here for just a minute. Mouse you could have, again, these almost look like expressions for the mouth, but you could have a mouth that just sits there. And its default position. We're going a little bit like this. You can do some studies, have all of these, practice them, see what you can come up with. Getting inventive. I'm just making these up as I go. There's, there's really never any right way to draw a head. This is wrong ways to draw it. So don't be afraid to try things that are different, things that you haven't seen before. You never know what you can come up with. Okay, So again, what we can do is a long math with very thin lips. Kinda like William, William Defoe. You can do a mouth which is very small or very large lips. So you could do as a mouth that curls up at the ends. To be honest, it's probably not as much variation was Mao's as there is with the other features. You can get some very interesting shapes with them. You can have big, big bottom lips. You can have big top lips and little bottom lips. And again, each one of these is going to have some level of association to it that allow us to relate with the head as being something that we're familiar with, something that we know. Again, the villain archetype, the heroic archetype, and all the archetypes in-between that if your character is able to be related to one of these archetypes, then all of a sudden, what ends up happening is the audience is able to understand them on some level. Alright, so this guy has got very sad looking eyes that is somewhat small. We'll give him thick eyebrows that are straight. I don't want him to be an evil guy. So instead of making them, drawing them out on an angle such as this, what I'll do is I'll have them just laying straight across the top of his brow. That might look something like this. I'm still going to capture a nice shape for them. And you can see how thick I'm attempting to make them. Again, Let's have fun with this. Let's see what unique, quirky and interesting character we can come up with. Okay, so once I've got the eyebrows roughly sketched in, I can then draw out his nose. And I think that his nose is going to be it's going to be a long curvy knows. Something like this. I like those monkeys with the big red noses. I'll take the nostrils up. And here we can widen the base of the nose. Usually it would sit in-between the eyes and I'd only be the width of one single eye. But in this case we're changing things up. And this is to show you that just because we've learned about the default proportions of the head, the idealized measurements doesn't mean that we can't bend the rules a little bit in order to get some uniqueness within our characters. Those unique attributes make the character much more memorable too. Make them much more recognizable. Now if you want to capture a, if you want to capture consistency within your character from one panel to the next, the thing to remember is that you've got to make the changes you've made in one view to every other single view that you're going to have all of them. So in other words, if I'm drawing this guy from the side, then I need to remember that his nose comes down to the point at which it lands on his face. In order to capture the same length, I've got to remember the shape of the jaw and how to represent that from the side view. Okay, so try to keep that in mind. All of those different changes, the ways in which we're pushing outside the boundaries established by the idealized proportions. We need to apply those same shifts to the proportions of the head that we're drawing in all views in order to capture the consistency within it. As for his mouth, what I'm gonna do is give him a small mouth. So I'm creating contrast within the features here. He's got a big nose. I'm gonna give him a small face, I mean, sorry, a small mouth. And I'll give him a little lip. So his mouth isn't really taken up too much space on his face. And you can see a pattern happening. Big eyebrows, little lies, big nose, mouth, and chin. That contrast really is what will capture the attention of your audience. We can suggest some anatomy here within his face. Now I have to also ask myself, Is he going to be a gone to character or is he going to be a character with a little bit more with a face that's more filled, filled out. I think what I'll do is give him more of a gaunt face. The shape that I've established for it kinda calls for it anyway. I'm gonna go ahead and we learned about the mouth muscles so we can hint toward that. I'll go up here during the cheekbone a little bit. Can't wait to see your faces by the, by the way, I think that'll be really interesting. Then we'll draw out the cheekbone on the other side. So the other thing I need to ask myself is easy going to have alert cheekbones or is he going to have high cheekbones? I think every character that we draw up here, we'll try to mix it up a little bit. This character has fairly low cheekbones. On the next one we'll draw our character with fairly high cheekbones. Okay, Wonderful. So we've got a very rough sketch drawn in for our character's face, but what about the kind of hair that we want to give them? Now here's how we go about blocking out here. So what I like to try and do is I'll take large clumps of hair. Well, let me, let me do some examples up over here to the side so you can see it a little bit more clearly. So what I'll typically do say that this is the head of my character here. That's the hairline. What I'll do is I'll take larger clumps of hair and just loosely sketch out a bit of a hairstyle that I might want them to have. And as I do, I'm thinking of these larger clumps is essentially ribbons of hair, a k that overlap one another. And you can slowly but surely capture the shape that you're looking for or the style that you want to create the characters hairdo by doing so, by approaching it in this way. Now once you've drawn out the general shape of the hair with these larger clumps. You're essentially combing the style of the hair out with these larger portions, is you can start to split them up. And head doesn't need to get complicated for comic book out. It really does not start that. Rule them out like this. And as I lay in, these additional contours are just separating the larger clumps. You'll notice that they follow the same flow. And what I want to try to avoid is anything that looks too uniform. And in order to do that, I simply make sure that these divisions are making into the larger portions of hair sitting at different distances to one another. So I have some that are sitting close together, some that are sitting further apart. Slowly, but surely we can start to describe the texture of the hairstyle that we've decided to go with. You can have lots of different hairstyles. Of course. You could have. Think about enemy, for example, right? How often do you see an animate character that is insanely recognizable for no other reason, but their hairstyle, hairstyle is can be quite incredible. You might have a head down here, for example. And hairstyle might look a little bit like this, right? That's the general shape of the hairstyle. Might have another one that has a hairstyle that looks a little bit more like this, right? Practice trying to come up with different hairstyle shapes. Now the one where air is just flowing down by the shoulders, could be a rock star, could be a lady. Now the character where we've got long hair, but it's a little bit more messy. And this one's definitely going to be a rock star. And again, once you've got those general shapes established, becomes very easy to start breaking it up and laying in. Well, in this case, we're going to be actually laying in the larger clumps to the overall hairstyle first. And then simply breaking it up. As we describe the texture of the hair itself. And really you don't have to get much more complicated than that. Yes, some people render out the hair of their characters and that's totally fine. You can certainly do that. But it's not a complete necessity. What I'll do is I'll knock out a general shape for his hair first. This may be the general shape of this hair is going to have quite a lot of width. It's going to be coming out at the sides there. And it's a bit messy. I'm breaking it up a little. You can have symmetrical hairstyles. You can have asymmetrical hairstyles. Again, it depends on the character that you're drawing. Your characters hairstyle is really messy. Well, that's probably not necessarily going to suit someone who is supposed to be a clean cut businessman as an example. And the thing is, is that if you don't make sure that you're lining everything up so that it makes sense. Well, you carry, your audience will have a disconnect with your character. They going to feel that something is off about them, that things don't quite make sense for some reason. I'm trying to do here is capture a little bit of symmetry. It looks almost like the mad hat or a little bit. Symmetry is quite important. Sometimes it's difficult to nail. Every artist suffers from that problem. In fact, you probably heard before that many monger artist will try to discourage them mangas from being flipped around when it comes to being printed over in the Western world because they don't want their work to be mirrored. And the reason for that is because once you mirror or an artwork, all of the symmetrical inconsistencies become quite apparent. So if you want to find a symmetry within your own work, then what you can do is hold it up in front of a mirror. And if you're working digitally, just flip the canvas horizontally and you'll see quite quickly where the mistakes reside within your work that are causing it to look asymmetrical, but also just general floors as well. Okay. So we've got his hair drawn out there. Now let's go ahead and start to refine what we have here on the page with a darker outline. Now you'll notice that I started out by drawing this in very, very lightly, this basic foundational sketch that I whipped up here. And there's a reason for that. It's because it makes it very easy to erase. And also, once I start going over the top of it with darker lines, the lighter lines somewhat just fall back into the backdrop and then not as noticeable. So I'm going to go over exactly what I've laid down here. Refining finished contours, making them sharper, adding some line weights onto them. Now, the other thing about this character is that he looks like an older gentlemen. Why is this that? What have we included in here that causes him to appear this way as opposed to a much younger character. You know, someone who might be in their 20s now he might very well be in his twenties. He doesn't look that way. And the reason is because while the larger noise for one, what happens as we get older, especially to men? Well, our noses get much longer. They get bigger, and so does their ears. Now this guy doesn't have very big ears, but I can tell you if we were to give him bigger ears, he'd probably look even older. I'm doing some cleaning up, erasing a little bit around the nose here. I'm going to describe the nostrils that in just a little hint of detail to describe some of the key forms of anatomy within his nose. Once I've done that, I'll jump over to the opposite side of his nose. And I will refine that nostril. There we go. Now let's move down to the mouth. Go ahead. Lay in a darker outline for the opening. Keep it fairly thin in the middle of the mouth opening, out to the corners. And add a little bit of a, a dash there at the end. Then we'll draw in the bottom lip a lay in some very subtle lines here to define the bottom lips outline the same with the top. Although I might just leave it as is to be honest. We can add some slight rendering or beyond here around the top lip. That's totally fine. That'll work. Just to show that it is a different tone than the rest of the face. Lips tend to be slightly darker. You have darker skin on your lips. So if we can suggest that now comic book art and certainly not a bad thing, contrast is something that seems to be visually desirable within comic book card, within any sort of art. So certainly never be afraid to use it. I'm adding a bit of rendering onto the lip. There. There we go. He looks like he's wearing lipstick, so I might just take some of that atom. Alright, next up, I'm going to lay some more darker tones underneath his bottom lip. Is to describe the shape of the muscle in this area. Sometimes you'll get a completely black core shadow under here. So it can, it can get quite dark. And because we've got a plane that faces are directly away from most lighting conditions that are projecting down onto the character from above. That's why we see such a darker tone in that area. Same with underneath the nose. If we wanted to, we could even drop a shadow which is being projected from the bottom of the nose down onto the rest of the face. I think we'll just leave that out for now though, since that's the focus of today's demonstration. Now what I'm going to do is start to make his jaw line look more defined. Going over the top of that lightly drawn sketch, the shape that I laid down for it earlier and essentially cementing it. And I'm just going over the top of my line, making it thicker and darker to the desired degree that I'm looking for. In order to capture the line quality that I think will work best for the finished illustration. Okay, so you can see the very interesting shapes we've got going on here around his chin as well. I'll do the same thing on the opposite side of his face. Pressing down hard, I'm going back over the top of these lines many times as I need to, in order to darken them up. And making sure that the shape that they ultimately describe is one that is strong. One that's a vivid, that's very, very important shape is everything. In fact, the silhouette really does play a huge part of your characters. So this guy has very strong silhouette, thanks to his hairstyle, thanks to the shape of his face. Silhouette is just the outline of the shape of each part of your character. And even if you have no details within your artwork, know Fancy Pants, shading or anything like that. That shape is going to come through and create the level of appeasement that you're looking for with from your audience. I'm trying to describe some of the anatomy around this area of his face. And I will add in some very light rendering. Okay, So this is, this is more of a style that you'd expect to see from. As an example, Maybe Jay Scott Campbell or Michael Turner. And they typically didn't use a whole lot of rendering. They would create areas like this Yesterday. Smaller pockets, smaller indentations within the anatomy. But really didn't go ahead and use a whole lot of cross hatching or shadows or anything like that? Sometimes they did, yes. But it wasn't a common look there you'd expect their artwork to have. So what I tend to do is I double up my lines. You can see that I've just done it right here around his jaw. You can do the same thing as well. And what it does is it just gives your single contours some more depth than they would have had if they were just sitting on their own. Okay, great. And you can see that I'm also adding in line weights around the outer cheek there. Some thickening up the lines in these areas. And really line weights. If I just do two lines like this, for example, they're usually going to thicken up around the middle, like so. And also around where they meet. There as an example, if you have some muscles, say that this is the outer contour of a very muscly arm. You're going to have a nice thick outline around the bulge. Here. It can up the outline of this muscle as it overlaps the other. And it's basically just a way of adding more interests to what would have otherwise been a very boring looking line. It's all about creating a captivating experience, your audience in the end, that's why we go to the trouble of adding in all of these effects. But really the most important part of the entire thing is that foundational loose sketch that we laid in to begin with because you wouldn't be able to add the icing on the cake if there was no cake. Okay, cool. So I'm getting, getting my eraser and doing some clean up. And we can add a little bit of rendering around the chin here. Just at the base. You can see how very thin that is a subtle the rendering can be. And it doesn't need to get any more hardcore than that. Hey, again, some more rendering around the mouth muzzle. I'm keeping it very light, very subtle, just enough to describe the forms in that area. We've got some definition within his cheek bones on this side of the face. So we can suggest them with some more subtle lines. I do in fact is just erase some of that. Okay. Then down here around the side of the mouth, we'll also add a very subtle suggestions of form. Could even be a single line and that ado. The very different style. Sometimes what I would do on an, on the comic book I'm working on right now, which is more dark fantasy. And with Doug fantasy comes a lot of really thick dark shadows and lots and lots of rendering as well. So here's the thing. The style you go for, the finish on your artwork that you decide to pick is going to lend toward the genre of comic book that you're doing. I think that this style would really suit a sci-fi comic book, for example, because it's extremely clean. Maybe if it's more of a dystopian sci-fi, you could add the shadows in there like a sci-fi Noah. But again, every genre or is going to have its own look in its own feel. So depending on the genre you've decided to go with for your story, you're going to want to represent your characters within it in the right way so that it makes sense within that genre. Going to erase underlying head here that we've added in. The side planes will get rid of this guy's face is really starting to come together. Now. Let's tackle his eyes. So it will lay in a more defined line, will lay in a more defined contour around the term. Darken them up ever so slightly, hinting at his eyelashes again, it's good to add a thicker outline around the eyes just to draw attention to them. The eyes are the windows into the soul, as they say. So. The first place that people are really going to try to hone in on why it's important to be able to draw her eyes well, because they end up being the first impression of the entire face, people are going to see them first. Everything else will be judged against them. So you get good at drawing eyes. In other words, just going back to style what I'd suggest you do if you're trying to develop your own one that's memorable is yes, take into account what I've said about ensuring that they are congruent with the genre you're working in. But also on top of it. Fine styles that you like that other artists have come up with. And if you feel like you'd enjoy drawing in that sort of style, come up with a version, that style that is uniquely yours. You can always be inspired and influenced by things. You don't want to copy the style exactly necessarily. But you can certainly derive yours from it. Put multiple styles into a big blender and see what comes out the other side. I think every single artist who has ever drawn has done that before. Going ahead and placing in some eyebrow texture now and you'll notice that it's, it's not unlike drawing in the hair, breaking them up into larger clumps, adding in some smaller indications of hair, and trying to get something that looks fairly textured, something that looks like it's actually made of hair. And again, one of the keys to being able to pull that off effectively is ensuring that you're able to go ahead and space those individual contours out in an organic looking way, meaning that they're not uniform, meaning that they're not evenly spaced apart. There's somewhat random, randomized. There we go. We've got his eyebrows are drawn in. I'm just going around the outside of them to further define their shape. And I'll do the same thing on the opposite side here. First, finding the shape of his eye, getting that sorted. And then I'll jump back up to the eyebrow. And you'll see that I didn't necessarily start with the eyes. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. But the moral of the story is that you can really, you can tackle this from any angle U1. There's a million ways to skin a cat right? Now what they say, Oh, there's more than one way. Same thing with your drawing. You can really approach it would in whatever fashion feels best for you. Again, on this side, we'll do the exact same thing with laying in those eyebrow, eyebrow strands. Drawn out. The speed at which you work, as long as you're able to capture a nice, neat looking presentation by the end. Work at whatever speed you like. I will say though, that if you work slower, it can cause you to overthink things a little bit. And ideally, the place you want to be in is working at a speed that's slightly faster than you can think. That your natural intuitive, artistic self can kick in and take over the situation. Because otherwise you can really. Self-monitor a lot. And when you're self-monitoring, you're increasing your level of anxiety. You're taking attention away from the creation itself and you're judging the artwork before it's even really done. So, rather than being so invested in the outcome, try to sink into the process as much as you possibly can. I'm a part of it and enjoy the important. Alright, so before we move on to the hair, what I'm going to do is just start to lay in some additional details. You can see I haven't even added in any wrinkles, but he's still looks like a fairly mature looking gentlemen. I'm going to add in some details around the eyes describing some of the forms and the anatomy that you'd see around this area. Adding in some slight rendering. Those render lines, you'll notice a very thin, they're very, very elegant looking. They're not defined, but they're not taking too much attention away from the main outlines that I've drawn down there because there's simply not as thick and dark. So make sure that your render lines and never thicker and darker and never take away more attention than the outline itself. Okay. They should be very, very thin. Yes, you can still add line weight to them for sure, but makes sure that that line weight does not exceed the thickness of the line weights around the outer contours. Okay, and now what we'll do is add in his iris and pupil. Now the positioning of the iris and pupil is pretty important. You don't want to. The top eyelid tends to rest over the top of the pupil and iris just a little bit. So what you'll find is that if you add your pupil right in the middle of the eye, they look really surprised or scared or freaked out. So if you want them to look more relaxed, then move the iris and pupil up a little bit. We can add a tiny bit more rendering and around here to describe the area where the form and the form of the eye socket and the nose somewhat merged together into one surface. Something like that. Maybe. There we have it. His face is pretty much done at this point. You could call that a finished artwork. Seriously. You could frame it hanging on your wall and show it off to your friends, your family. Say, Hey, here's what I learned in heads and faces workshop. I'm adding in some brown lines up the top here. Again because he is somewhat of an older looking character. Check this out, right, I'm laying in the main outline and then I might place in a slight render line that runs against that main outline. I could do the same thing. This one as well. Again, just keeping it subtle so that's too much, so I'm gonna get rid of it. And I can continue these lines up and around the brow, up and around the forehead. You can see that they really do add some character. The head that we're drawing up here. The same thing on the opposite side. Okay, cool. So I forgot to add in old around his bottom eyelid on this side of the head. So I'll do that now. Again, just these little lines to suggest form. That's all you really need. Next up, we will tackle their hair finally. Now, here can be, it can be very long and tedious in terms of the amount of time that it takes or it can be fairly quick. One good thing that I'll say about here though, is that it's something that doesn't lead to look any particular way. All I would say is that comb. So as I draw out these lines, check this out, right? As I draw out that line. I'm almost imagining myself as combing the hair in the direction that I want it to flow in. So what I'd say is think about it in that way yourself. Again, we've got the main clumps of hair defined. Now it's just a matter of breaking them up. We'll do the same thing over here. Again. I'm just pulling out the hair, combing it in the direction. I want it to flow in. And I'm trying to keep these lines as smooth and as free-flowing as possible. Again, here is a very organic element that we add to the head and biogenic amine that it, it, it follows its own path. It, it never looks any one way. All the time. It's always blowing in the wind. It's getting messy, it's getting combed, it's getting neat and tidy. It's getting styled in different ways. It's malleable. So there's fairly little pressure put on one's self when it comes to actually drawing it out. People aren't going to not going to necessarily be analytical about it. Now of course, there's some characters that have a very recognizable and uniquely established hair lines, such as beaucoup from Dragon Ball Z, for example. And think about those hairstyles is that you do have to get them right. Because if you don't, people will say, hey, that's not going to use here. Or whatever character you've come up with. I'll say that's not your character's hair. But even then, those characters are going to find themselves in situations where the elements are at play. And at, if they're in the middle of a hurricane, you can bet that the hair is going to be blowing around in the wind. Otherwise, it'll look like it's made of some kind of a nice solid plastic or something and there's no hair gel and the world that can withstand hurricanes. So just keep that in mind. I'm slowly but surely making my way around this characters hairstyle. Breaking it up, bring it out, clumped by clump. And I challenge you to come up with lots of different hairstyles, practice those hairstyles. Try to create something which is going to with stand the test of time. But most importantly, have fun with it as well. When you have fun drawing, that's when you get the most creative. That's when you're going to find that. Come up with the best ideas. Which is kind of annoying because you would think that you'd get your best ideas when you actually tried to come up with your best ideas. And you put effort into coming up with your best ideas. But the most annoying thing in the world is that these things happen when you're not trying at all. So that's just the nature of creativity. It likes to be free. So don't put pressure on it. Enjoy the process, Have fun, and let the chips fall where they may. Now that's different from practice when you're practicing. For example, the basic structure of the human head. That's a different deal. Or the anatomy of the human body. You're trying to accomplish something very specific. They are, there's not a whole lot of creativity that actually needs to go into it. So yes, be very, very conscious of what you're doing in that instance. What we're doing here today is actually quite creative. There's some structure involved with it for sure, but you are able to, to really push outside the boundaries of the established set of rules and just look at 3. Brush Size & Pressure: So one piece of advice I'd give you guys is to use a very small pen or pencil. If you're working digitally, I'm referring to your brush size there. If you're working traditionally, I'm talking about you're making sure that you keep your pencil or pen sharp. And so no matter what distance you're working at from the canvas and what whatever your DPI is, whatever resolution you're using for your canvas. What I always try to do is make sure that my brush size, if I can see it here, right, this is how big. I don't want to draw this big. Of course, that's not gonna be a good thing, right? That's going to be too large. I don't want it to be that big. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to shrink it down. And I don't want it to be this big either. So I'm going to shrink it down even more. And what I wanna do is make it so small, is small as I can get it until those crosshairs appear on the screen. Now I'm working in Clip Studio. I don't know if the same thing happens. If you're working in some other drawing application, but until it gets to the crosshairs and then I'm just going to take it up one. That's the ideal size that I want it to be at k. Now as soon as I zoom in or out, that's going to change. So I'll just take it back down to, again, size, as small as it can possibly get until the crosshairs appear. And then I'll turn it up one. So it ends up being basically a pinpoint. And so that's what I'd recommend for your own brush sizes. And the other thing is that you want to keep it nice and light. So you don't want to be drawing like this. You're gonna be keeping it nice and light and you can see just how much smoother the lines become lighter. I press. 4. Female Hair Bun Head: So next up, we are going to draw out a female head and we'll have her facing in the opposite direction. We're going to start this out just as we started it out before with a sphere. And I'm telling you really it's the head foundations that are going to give you the best success of your drawing because they establish everything right in the beginning. That later on you can practice the facial features individually, of course, master each of them. That's great. I think the order at which you learn these things and conquer them is really important because if you learn how to get really good at drawing facial features before you've really got a handle on the foundations of the head. Well, unfortunately, you're going to be able to draw facial features really well, but you won't be able to place them onto a head that is foundationally sound and so not going to lead to a very good-looking head. Started out with the sphere here. And you can see that no matter what modifications we are going to make to our head in order to make it look more unique. I'm still going to make sure that I divide the sphere up into quarters. Once I've done that, kind of chop off the sides just as before. Now, remember that you can chop off more or less of the sides in order to get a different shaped head. So say for example, that here I wanted to get ahead that was a little wider. Now in order to make it symmetrical, you still probably going to want to have the same amount of distance on either side of the head here. So I'm looking at how much space I've got over here. I'm taking into consideration for shortening. And so it is gonna be about that much space on this side. I'm looking at the width of the face in general order to once again figure out how much of the side plane I'm going to establish whether or not you have a wide or thin looking head. It actually really doesn't come down to how much he cut off the sides because that's always it's always going to be cut off to a point where you're going to have an even amount of space on either side of the face so that you can maintain its symmetry. So what determines how wide or narrow a head is? In the end is how far down you bring it. So here we're going to do the stock opposite of what we did on the initial head example that we completed. And we're going to, let's end our head at about here, right? Actually, that will probably be a little bit, That's ridiculously small. Attended about here. Alright, so it's gonna be a nice heart-shaped head rather than a sharp jaw line. What we can have is a little bit more of a rounded one. I'm tweaking the jaw line, I'm messing around with it and so on each of these examples, you'll be able to see how the head can be modified in different ways. And I'll make her chin point. He's still it's just that her jaw line is going to be somewhat rounded. Now, this actually looks like a little bit more of a younger person's head. Isn't it funny how we've got these visual associations, even to General different head shapes. That longer head is going to make for a more mature look in your character. The smaller face that's more rounded, that's going to give you an appearance of a younger person, although that doesn't mean that you can't apply it to an older person. It's just very interesting observation, of course. Now the nose, we will do a little note up here. Okay, so it's gonna be fairly short, so we'll take it up to the top and you can place it anywhere, right? You don't even have to keep it the same as me, if you like, of course, but experiment. Again. Have fun with this. And we can make the mouth really low. So now in this example, what we have is the nose and the mouth being quite a large distance apart. In fact. In fact, let's raise the nose even more. There we go. So now that we've raised the nose, we can figure out where the eyes are going to be. And we'll put the eyes down here. So there's gonna be a kind of a weird looking character, right? Maybe it is an alien in humans skin, hair nails. And as for the ears, well, we can make them large. Right? The hairline, we'll we'll make that a straight hairline, that one that runs right across the top. And we go then we can draw in the neck. Since we are drawing a female character here, I'll keep that fairly thin and fairly sleek. Like this. There we have it. I'll reposition the head so that it lines up with the previous head that we drew. And I'll even enlarge it a little bit. Okay, great. Now let's go ahead and start sketching in the facial features, really roughly. I'm going to give her some nice big eyes this time around, but they're going to be kind of evil looking, okay, so they're not going to be sad like the previous character, that they're going to be evil. So I'm messing around with the shape of the face, and I'm also messing around with the shape of the facial features themselves. So nice, round but evil looking at is that a set fairly far apart actually? As for the nose, well, in see here that it's been taken up a fair way. And I'm going to have it pointed upward, unlike our previous example where the noise was pointed downward. Okay, there we go. We've drawn in her nose there, again very loosely. Talked about different nose shapes before. You never really changing the anatomy that is placed down. You're always going to have the same anatomy. It's just that, that anatomy is represented in very different ways. You're always going to have the bulb of the nose. But that bulb of the nose can be placed down at any scale and any shape really same with the bridge of the nose, same with the nostrils. See that this lovely lady has a very small nose. As for her mouth. Well, this dude's amounts was fairly small, so I'm gonna make hers quite big. Okay, Now again, this is going to be weird looking character because it greatly vary, greatly. Runs outside the boundaries of the idealized proportions of the head. Alright, so there we go. Run that in. Now as for her eyebrows, well, what we'll do is again, we'll make them the opposite of the one that we drew before. We'll make them nice and thin and raise them up. So that all the way up here now, again, kind of ridiculous, but it works. You know, stylization can be extremely fun. Cheekbones. We can bring them out a little bit. Something like this. That might be a little bit too much actually, since we are drawing a female character, usually what we want to try to achieve is a softer appearance. I'm going to try to keep her cheeks and her face in general, fairly soft looking. There we go, That's a bit better. Alright, and then finally, we can start drawing out some hair. And I think this example will call for more of a maybe a bun at the back of her hair. Yeah. That'll allow us to draw in a ribbon. Show you how I would go about that. And not to mention drawing a hair bundle is quite interesting as well. Ears. I'm going to draw in some nice big earrings so that we can take a look at some accessories. And I might also even icon the makeup with this character as well. Some nice giant earrings. They're a great butt on this side of the head. We might actually see that these earrings poking out on the other side as well. There we go. And I'll draw in the top of her eyelids as well. You can see it's very light. Okay. There's certainly nothing that has been defined just yet. This is the stage you want to get it to before you start laying in those final outlines. Once we've done that, we can go ahead and start to define the facial features. Let's do those first. I am going to start with the eyes. This time. I'm going to give this lovely lady some beautiful thick eyelashes. So we'll define the outline of the eyes opening first before we do that, however, what I'm focused on at this point is just capturing the shape of the eye. Making sure that that looks good and vivid. Than what I'll do is I'll pull out those nice big eyelashes. And remember, the best way to do that is to go ahead and just draw out their general shape first. Never want to pull out individual eyelash strands. You can see the ones that I added, a smaller one there between the side eyelashes and the top eyelashes. That's fine. Then we've got the bottom set of eyelashes. So you can see we've got some really done thick eyelashes happening there. Okay, great. I can define their outline further. It really making sure that the shape of the eyelashes is defined, nice, undefined. Where I go ahead and start filling them in. That's what I'll do now, is start to just lay in a bit of a black tone in there. There we go. I'm just filling those in with black and you can see as well like straight away. How much attention is drawn to them as soon as you fill in those eyelashes with black really does highlight the eye and amplify the vividness that will fill in the side eyelashes. And we'll fill in the bottom set of eyelashes as well. If you're looking for ideas as to how to get creative with your head. Besides just, again, being curious enough to mess around with the shape and the positioning of the proportions and the measurements and all that other good stuff. Jump online, jump onto Pinterest, jump onto Google Images, and find some, search for some interesting looking people. If you're looking for ideas of what to search, it could be anything, it could be genres. Or you could say that, for example, you do want to do a fantasy comic or create a fantasy character concept of some kind. Well, what you can do is you can look up NTC character concept. And there's gonna be a bunch of other illustrations that artists just like yourself who have come up with ideas that they've had and you can take some of those ideas and do something new with them. You could look up Viking costumes. You look, you could just look up. You can just watch a movie and look at the different characters within the movie, your favorite movie. It really depends on what kind of character you're trying to create, what genre they reside in. Let's go to determine what you research and what you search up. Every designer is going to have their own mood board full of different references. Okay, so we've got her eye drawn in there. Let's go ahead and do the other one now. Nice big eyelashes. And whether or not I'm doing a idealized head or a crazy-looking characterized head like this one. I pretty much always execute the same method, the same series of steps. Outline the eye shape. First, I lay in the eyelashes in pretty much the same way. All of the character eyelashes that I draw, I pretty much outline and lay in at one thickness or the other. Lady has very thick eyelashes. So you really get a good look at how AI. Go about doing that. So just as before, we'll draw out the shape of the eyelashes first, determining what their thickness is going to be. A little eyelash. They're sitting between the top set of eyelashes and the eyelashes around the side of the eye. And we'll lay in the bottom set of eyelashes. And what I wanna do to make sure that the face is symmetrical. I want to ensure that the eyelashes on either side, R&D going to be the same thickness. Because if they're not, then well one I will simply look like it has larger eyelashes than the other and that may not be the intention that I want to go for initially. So just keep an eye on that. If you do notice that your eyelashes on exactly symmetrical go back just as I have done. And completely redo it. Completely redo it if you don't have to. But certainly make the tweaks and the changes that you need to make in order to get back on track. There had been times where I've started out. I've started drawing a head for a character. I've gotten a fairway here and, and just realize that that head was never going to work and I erase it and I completely restarted. It breaks my heart a little bit on the inside, but in the end, that doesn't matter. What matters is the finished result and whether or not I managed to communicate my idea in the way that I imagined it being. It's all about communication in the end. So think of drawing as a playground, a testing lab where different ideas are going to be tried. Some will fail, some will succeed. And because of that, you don't want to invest your self-worth into your artwork too much. It's going to be whatever it's going to be. The conduit, I guess, between your imagination and what ends up on the page. And so you've just got to trust in your own artistic intuition and hope that it all works out for the best. But if it doesn't, don't beat yourself up about it too much, that's okay. Learn what you can from it. That's the gift that it gives you. That's the gift of failing gives you. I fail every single day at different things. Usually to do with my art. I learned something new because of it. Someone who has become a great artist, who has succeeded in their craft is simply somebody who has failed more times than other people. The trick is to do something with those mistakes, to take notice of them when they happen, and to make sure that they don't go to waste. So I'm going in here. I've got her other eye drawn out. Looking nice and beautiful. And then what I'll do is I'll draw in the iris and the pupil. Remember, make sure that you're being conscious of the amount of space that you're a virus and pupil are taking up in the I see. I just got rid of it. There. Have another crack at it. That's looking a little bit better. You can see that I haven't drawn the iris completely round. Actually tried to add some shape to it there. I'll add in a little reflection to the iris as well. Now on the other side, I'll do the exact same thing. I want to make sure though that my iris and pupil or at the same level that want my character to look or googly eyes wide, open that iris and make sure that it's coming down to the same level as the one on the opposite side of the face. Again, just being very observant. Want to be keeping these things in check, things like symmetry as you work. Once we've done that, we can move on to the eyebrows. Just as before by going to define the shape of the eyebrow first. And you can see even though we're drawing a very different character here in comparison to first character we drew up. That we're still taking the same approach as we did before, but still outlining the eyebrows for example. And we're going to lay in the eyebrow texture just as we did before. And so what this means is that regardless of your style, you can still use the same method. And it's going to work out for you. These are very different characters to the ones that I would regularly draw. More idealized characters that I would regularly draw. So I want to get this eyebrow right as well on the opposite side of her head. What I'm gonna do is bring the bridge of her nose up a little bit so I can see where that eyebrow ends and where it begins. Then I'll have another crack at it. So you can see some things I'm tweaking here. I'm not getting it right the first time. Try to analyze your work with a bit of a skeptical eye. Especially at first. Try to look out for mistakes and be conscious of them. What you'll notice is that as I lay in the eyebrow and the far side of the head, I actually tried to hook the underside of the Brout into toward the eye. So you can see that flat plane happening. It's important to try to add that in if you can. What I'll do before I move on to anything else is just adding the eyebrow fors it than to actually look like they're made of hair and look, maybe in some instances you wouldn't even need to articulate the eyebrow hair. Depends on the style you want to go with. Me. I like it because it gives a certain amount of texture to the eyebrow. Makes it look like it's made of here. Rather than just being drawn on childlike. There we go. Then next up, I'll move on to the nose. Let's do some cleaning up, some got my eraser out here. Get rid of some of these construction lines so that they're not distracting us at all. There we go. This side plane will get rid of. Okay, so that's all looking good. Wonderful. Now we've got a nice clean area to work with. Next up, I'm going to define the outline of the nose. Thickest outline is usually going to be around the base of the nose, since usually it's going to be facing away from the lion. The same can be said for the opening of the nostril. And in fact, a lot of shadow that's going to collect in this area and so usually give it a darker outline. Once you've drawn the nostrils in there, you can go ahead and placing a little indentation where the nostrils meets the bulb of the nose to describe the forms a little bit in that area. I'll add a slight amount of rendering up here just to describe the top of the nose bridge where it joins onto the brow. And then actually let me get rid of this part of the nose for a moment. Redraw that in. Just a little too messy for my liking. There we go, that's looking a bit better. Wonderful. So next up, I'm going to draw in the mouth. Okay, Now as before, we're going to see that angle of the mouth become more apparent dangling away from us. So I want to try to describe that with the form of the lips as I draw them in. And you can see that on the far side of the mouth, It's smaller, there's less room. And the side of the mouth that's closest to us. Why? Because it's simply further away. That's how perspective works. That which is further away. It gets smaller. As it recedes. Things which are closer get larger, they scale up. See, I'm adding in my line weight to the corners of the mouth, in the middle of the mouth here. Then we have her lips. For this character, I am going to add in some lipstick. And I'll show you exactly how I go about it once I define the outline of her lips a little more. Now, for a lady character, you can most certainly outline the lips and define them much more than you would on a male character. Because it's going to work like the way in which lipstick was intended to work. It's going to add more contrast to the face. Draw more attention to the mouth in the same way that eyelashes draw more attention to the eyes. Okay, cool. So now that we've got her lips drawn in place, CAN a reflection to give them a little bit of shininess. I'll do that on both the top lip and the bottom lip. Now what I do in order to imply lipstick is I simply start rendering these areas out. And I'll go around the top first. And usually the top lip is going to have a little bit more rendering than the bottom lip is going to have a darker tone. I'm changing up the rendering along the top lip as well to describe the form that we're dealing with there. Actually, you know what, I'm going to undo that. I didn't quite like the rendering and how it's looking. A little bit too uniform. So what I'll do is maybe try this instead. Nope, that's still not looking the way that I want it to look. Maybe I'll go in the opposite direction here. As you can see, you know, I make mistakes and changes as well. I see things that I want to readjust. That's just part of the process. Especially with rendering. I find that I make a lot of changes along the way. I don't always get it right. And what I'm looking for is a nice amount of energy to it as well. A nice amount of movement. Alright, let's do the same thing with the bottom lip. You can see that I'm painting these render lines out somewhat. To describe the form of the bottom lip. Describe its surface. And what I'll probably do is just go straight over the top of those reflections here. To begin with. And once I've drawn in the rendering, I'll simply erase it in those areas. It is handy to have an undo button, of course, and by all means, take full advantage of the Undo button. Some people against it, some people for it. I personally, all I care about in the end is the final presentation and how that looks. If it looks good in the end. And I did whatever I needed to do to get there. That's all I care about. Okay, there we go. You can see I've got a nice gradient happening there now around the lips. And that their gradient gets darker towards the opening of the mouth. As it spreads out toward the middle. Tone gets lighter. Alright? So we'll add in some rendering around the top of the eye now. Because in this area you'd see a little bit more darkness, a little bit more definition. But I'm also not going to add that much rendering either because. Remember that we're drawing a female head here. And it can very quickly end up just being too much on a female head when you start to lay down that hatching. Okay, so let's define the outer contour of her face. Now. We want this to be strong, but not in the sense that it ends up being masculine. We still want to have a nice feminine look to the character. But what I mean is that we want a strong outline that's nice and vivid, undefined. Hey, we've got her joy here. You'll see that there is some sharp corners. And I'm adding in, but there's subtle. And I'm doing that once more to make the shape that I'm drawing more vivid. Because of it's completely routed and it's completely soft. And especially if there's no line weights that are added to it. That's when you're going to run into problems. That's when it's just going to look boring and make you'd ever want to meet outline. You always want it to look like it's done to look polished. And this is how you do it. So it's a mixture of, it's a mixture of curved outline and corners. So you look at the cheek, for example. We've got a curved outline, which is slightly curved. Then we've got another curved outline, but these two meet at a sharp corner. And we've got another curved outline, again sharp corner here. And we've got another code outline around the chin, sharp corner here. So again, mixture of sharp corners and curved edges is what will lead to a nice solid looking outline for your character. And then we've got her forehead. We will draw in here as well. And just as before, just as with the rest of her face, I'm going to go ahead and try to capture a nice vivid outline for it. Okay, Wonderful. That's her face done for the most part. Now it's time to well, let's move on to the ears because that's really the final part of her face that we are yet to address. Now we gave this lovely lady much larger looking ears. We'll go ahead and make sure that we add in the anatomy that we articulate it nicely. And hopefully you've practiced your ears. Hopefully you've had a chance to sit down and draw a few of them out. Adding in the line weights as I go here. Very important. We are going to add in the earring. Now we'll just draw the ear out as if it wasn't there. Do some erasing, get rid of some of those construction lines just to clean up the situation a little bit. Then we'll continue on with refining the anatomy of the ear. Nice good outline going for it. So we've got the Y shaped piece of cartilage runs around the outside of the ear. Ended encompasses the inner ear that we see the ear Hall and these other modes of cartilage being pulled into it. Then we've got the little separation up the top of the Y shaped piece of cartilage that somewhat dips in a little bit. There it is. A can add in some rendering around the ear is to describe the forms that we're dealing with if you'd like. I usually leave it at that for this particular style. Now let's go ahead and move on to the hair. And we'll be going over the exact same process that we did before in the previous example. And it doesn't matter what your head you're drawing. It's always going to be the same old process. And that's what's great about it, is once you learn that process, you know that it doesn't matter what you're drawing. You can depend on it to help you out. Okay, So going to lay in the general clumps of hair here, combing it back. Just as we did before on the previous character. And as I comb the hair back, especially here because it's sitting so close to the head. I'm making sure that it follows the spherical form of the skull. But I also know that it's being pulled back into the bunch at the back, the back of her head which is held together with the ribbon. So because it's being pulled in that direction, I know that as it follows the sphere, that's where it will lead all the way back to where it's being pulled. As I said before, here is malleable and you can pull it. You can comb it whatever direction you want to Coumadin. The hairline can be really whatever you want it to be. If you're drawing a punk character, you can really get inventive with the hairline. There's a natural hairline that most people have and that can split off into other very common hair lines. As I mentioned before, the receding hairline, curved hairline, the square hair line that runs straight across the head from one side of the other, similar to the one that we've got here for this lady character. Now I'm just going to split up what I've laid in there. I still want to make it appear neat and maybe to an extent, I don't need to split it up that much. Here's the thing. What's going to give it more depth as if I start adding in those thicker lines. And especially up the top here I'm going to make any divisions I have to add in. I wanna make them sin because I don't want them to take attention away from those major clumps. Remember, we don't want anything to be too uniform. We're really trying to do here is capture the flow of the hair, the direction in which it's traveling. And it can be very easy to overdo here. I probably overdone this lovely ladies hair around the sides especially. But that's okay, doesn't really matter. I think the same problem. Absorb with rendering all the time. You end up rendering the heck out of something and before you know it, you detailed everything out and it just looks like a mess. So always be wary of the dangers of that. You don't know when to stop. That's half the battle. It's like once we learn a new technique. And I had to do here, for example, we want to go all out with it. We really want to put it to the test. And so we overdo it. Alright, so now around the edge of the hairline, I'm going to start to add in more little strands that don't quite make it as far. But allow us to add more contrast around the hairline just to make it look more defined. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. I'll do the same thing over here. Once again. If we were to go ahead and start to lay in some thicker outlines, the made clumps of hair that would break it up a bit and allow the viewer to the cipher more easily. What it is they're looking at. Which is why, as I said before, it's important to keep details and rendering quite subtle, quite thin, while the main outlines like the one I'm doing here around the general hairstyle. I kept nice and thick and bold, at least in comparison to those smaller details. Alright, so I'm going through adding in more of an outline here. Keeping it neat, keeping those lines nice and energetic, dream lined. All-in-one. I'll trim the shape of the hair. It bit here. Quite like the way it's bulging out in some areas. Again, the outer shape, the silhouette of your character. It really does matter quite a lot. So split the hair off a little bit more around here. This area, just to define the hairline in that section. There we have it. Let's draw in this ribbon. Now this is going to be a somewhat stylized Ruben, but in comic book art, everything is stylized. Degree to which you stylize it out. Well, that's a stylistic choice. That's completely up to you. Maybe you've got a super realistic Alex Ross type style. Well, in that case you might want to get some actual references of ribbons up on the screen and try to capture them as closely as possible so that the realistic drawing you're creating as some resemblance to reality or a closer resemblance to reality. But now I'm just going off of the symbolic representation. I've stored away inside my mind of what a ribbon looks like and how it works, how it folds in on itself. I probably should have actually gone ahead and won some longer ribbons down the side of your head. But I'm just going to pretend that they're at the back there. Beautiful. So we've drawn that in and we've got the ribbon as it wraps around her hair and holds it together. So we'll lay that in. And then we've got the hair bun. And even though it's the shape of a button, we are going to make it look as though it's made of hair. In very much the same way we went about making the rest of the hair look like it was here. We're going to break it up into larger clumps once we've defined the outline. And then we're simply going to add in some subdivisions, splitting it up to give it texture. Now there's different degrees of detail that you can add to the hair of your characters. You don't need to split it up as much as I've split it up here. In fact, looking at, at, uh, probably split it up too much, I would say. Alright, so again, remembering the direction in which the hair is being pulled, the way in which it's folding in on itself. You could, you can leave it as that really. Some styles, depending on how stylistic they really are, they'll tend to do that too. I'll add in only a few lines and that's all that's needed to indicate that what it is they've drawn the head barn or hairdo that they've given their character is indeed made of hair. And see that the more hair strands are, the more head clumps you divide, the more complex it looks. The more busier box. If you've got a very stylized look for your artwork, it can ruin that a little bit. But to keep the consistency of the hair that I've already established intact, am going to add a few more strands. You more divisions into these larger clumps. Just really quick. And you can see that I'm using this nice S-shape to capture a lot of the hairs trajectory. So we call that the line of beauty in fact. And if you Google it, you'll notice that it's something that shows up a lot within it for some reason there's a very statically pleasing contour, a very aesthetically pleasing line to behold. And so if you can incorporate it into your art work, it really does lend to the lack of ability. The final presentation by onlookers, by your audience. Okay, so there we go. We've got the hair been drawn in there. And the only other thing that we need to Draw around before, of course we had in the neck is her earrings. So we'll draw those in now. We can see that I'm completely derailing off of the initial sketch. I laid it in for the earrings. And the reason is because I want to make sure that they connect to the ear lobe and they simply weren't in the underlying sketch. So you can deviate from your initial draft as much as you want to. Sometimes it's their only to tell you what not to do. Because you realized later on that, hey, this wasn't going to work. This doesn't look good. Sometimes. I'll just need to draw something out in order to figure out that that's not what I want. I can't tell you how often that is the case because in the beginning you've got nothing to work with. It could work out. It might not work out. But you don't necessarily know what got what approach you're going to take in order to arrive at one or the other. So if you can figure out what not to do, you're already ahead of the game. In order to figure out what not to do, sometimes you have to do the wrong thing. To begin with. You see it on the page and you go, Oh, okay, ****, that's not going to work. My guess. What I'm saying is, don't be, again, don't get down. If your artwork doesn't turn out perfect. The first time you lay down a line. The decision to lay down a line as only to make progress. Whether that progress be to move yourself closer to the ideal outcome, or if it moves you further away than ideally you want to try to make sure that you get back on track. So I've tried to get her earring as well as round as I can possibly get it so that it's not too lopsided. Do the same thing on the opposite side of her head here. Sometimes you go to sketch it out, sometimes you can lay it in in one fell swoop. Depends on what level of skill. I'm kinda half and half. Sometimes they can lay it in with a single line. Other times I've just got to sketch it out really lightly and then go over the top of it and define it. Like what I'm doing right here. I guess you're getting a very intimate look at the way in which I work. And hopefully you're seeing that not everything I do is perfect. We look at the finished presentation of someone's art and we think that they must be some kind of wizard. We go, How the **** did they do that? It looks like magic. But really oftentimes it's just that they fixed the right mistakes. And they, they, they took their correct steps along the way in order to execute their process properly. But make no mistake. It does not just end up on the page as a perfect projection of everything they hoped and dream it would be every artist can look at their artwork and see the floors within it, because we're our own worst critics no matter what level we get to. Now hopefully we we're not so hard on ourselves as we get better and that we can appreciate the finer things about it as well. Not just the areas that we dislike about it. Now what we can also do is we could give this lovely lady some earrings or some issued call them piercings, some some studs. Would you call them and we're just going to call them piercings in her top lip. There we go. And maybe even in her bottom lip as well. Again, facial accessories, right there we go. And then we can draw in her neck. And that'll be the final thing that we draw in for this character's head. She's done, she's all done. Another interesting, memorable and unique looking character. What made them unique and interesting? Well, we deviated somewhat from the idealized proportions that we learned about in the beginning. But the thing is, is that if we didn't know what the idealized proportions were, he might not have been able to tweak them in the right way because as I said before, you can still mess up ahead. No matter how wacky the proportions are. You can still mess it up. Again. Things like symmetry are going to cause you to not end up with a drawing that is most optimal. As crazy and unique is your head may look, It's still going to look like it could exist. So that's the main thing. Alright, great, so that is second head drawn up and ready to roll. 5. Orc Head: So now we'll draw another male character, but this time we'll draw a bearded male character, maybe a bearded elf looking character. Just as before, we'll start out with a sphere. Started out the same way every single time. Yeah, these heads aren't really that dynamic, but you could certainly take this same proportions. Keeps, keep them in mind. Keep the characteristics of their proportions in mind. Then as you observe the head from above, you observe it from below. You can always then go ahead and scale the proportions that you've established and these higher-level views accordingly. It's important to just take note if a character looks like they have a long looking nose, ensure that you're drawing them from another perspective. That they also appear to have a long looking knows. It's really that simple. It's interesting because I get asked that question all the time. Actually, how do I make characters look the same from one panel to the next? Now, the really interesting thing is though, that characters can look completely different when you're drawing them from the side, as opposed to when you're drawing them from the front. For this character, I think what we'll do is we'll do another, I think we'll do a relatively idealize proportioned face actually, since we haven't necessarily done one yet. But we'll mess around with the other aspects of his head in unique and interesting ways. For example, we could give him a really square looking jaw by pulling it out at the sides and then giving him a massive chin, are really, really broad chin. You know, he's he's a really, I guess, meet head you looking dude. We'd go big gels there. And we can go ahead and start to divide his face up so this character will put his nose. We'll put it up here a little bit more. I think so we'll raise the nose and comparison to the first male character that we drew. And we'll also raise the mouth to give him an exceptionally large chin. And has for his eyes will put them in about here. And I reckon what will also attempt to do is draw his eyes fairly close together as well, just to see how that looks. And then as for his ears will make them dwarf like or, or l flag. Keep things interesting and maybe we'll give him a bit of a Mohawk as well. So what I'll do is just very roughly sketch that in around the top. Again, just to mix things up a bit and have some fun. And his neck will be super thick. These characters all look quite stylized of course, but once again, you render them out and just shade them realistically, they'll start to look quite convincing. It's a matter of style. Honestly. I'll do some erasing around here, get rid of those construction lines a bit. And there we have it. So now let's draw in the eyes. And I'm going to draw these fairly close together. And I'm going to make them nice and small. And it might make them, rather than being evil looking or sad looking. I'll just have them drawn straight across like this. Do the same thing on the opposite side of the head. And as for his eyebrows, yeah, we'll we'll keep them nice and large. But I want to keep them sitting quite close to the top of his eyes. Jordan, the eyebrow on the opposite side. The side that's closest to us. Focusing on capturing a nice shape at this point. And I'm trying to work a little bit quicker here. Now for this knows, what we'll do is I'm going to try to get a little bit creative with it. I'm going to give him some nice big nostrils. Maybe something like this will work well. There we go. So he looks, he looks almost a bit beastly looking, which is exactly the intention I'm trying to have for this character has for his mouth. I'm just going to have it run straight from one side to the other. And I might give him some teeth as well. Go, He's like a dwarf or rather an orc. I would say. My head is in a fantasy irrelevant the moment. So I'm just spitting out random fantasy archetypes. But no, we definitely creating an archaea. Okay, great. We'll give him a little bit of a goatee as well. I think that'll work quite well. Can have that time together at the bottom, they're kinda like a ponytail goatee. And then we'll draw in some very loose anatomy for his. Here. I'll erase some of the construction lines within it. It's to neaten things up a bit. Erase that construction line right in the middle of his face as well. Rid of that. This side plane k so neatly it out. We've got a clear idea is to what the main attributes of this character are going to consist of. And then I will give him some accentuated cheekbones. And I can even mess around with the shape of his forehead. I can have it pushed back a little bit more to make him look kinda boneheaded. I mean, the other thing we could do is just not give him any eyebrows at all. I think it'll raise those that it makes him look even scarier. More like the ORC that he's supposed to be. Okay, there we go. Now we've got something quite interesting going on for this guy. I think we're ready to start to refine what's there. I'll lay in the contour that describes the shape of his eye. A nice sharp outline. And you could fill up an entire sketchbook just with heads like this. And I tell you what, you'd be pretty savvy at drawing heads by the end of it. I definitely encourage you to do that. If you're serious about getting good at drawing people, you've just, you've got to dedicate that time to it. And you'll notice a difference. You will get so much more comfortable doing this stuff. And the quality of your work will certainly increase. There's no doubt about it. I wish it was more complicated and I could tell you something, some kind of crazy, difficult trial you'd have to go through in order to be able to become the artist you hope of being one day. But unfortunately, it's no more exciting than just practicing this stuff over and over again till you reach the level you want to get to with it. And the funny thing is if you just keep practicing forever, you'll keep getting better forever and ever. That's kinda the way it works. And really you could call it getting better, or you could call it refining your skill set. However you want to look at it. I see it as getting to know yourself as an artist. Getting to know the way that you work. Getting to know the way you work with the tools at your disposal and the things that lie deep within your imagination. There's no telling what level of potential you could possibly have in all of those different areas in the execution of your work in terms of the subject matters that you end up drawing out onto the page. That's exciting. It truly is. Okay, so I'll draw in his mouth and we're in a nice thick outline. Therefore, it I'm just going over the top of what I've already drawn in here with a thicker outline at darker outline. You can see that that outline is still fairly thin as well. I've got the sharp corners drawn in there to develop confidence in anything. It's, it's all about exposure therapy, right? For example, when I used to teach in the classroom, I can tell you that very first day. But I had to step in there in front of all the students. I was freaking out, man, I'm a massive introvert. And so I was totally not down with it. In fact, when I was in high school, every day, we every time we had an oral presentation, we had to get up in front of the class and talk about some topic. I'd skip that day. I pretended I was sick, totally fake it so that I didn't have to go to school and our oral presentation day. But of course, somehow I ended up finding myself teaching in front of entire, entire classroom of students every single week. And the first time I did it was really uncomfortable. I was so nervous, very shy. I was always shy even as a kid. And now here I was. I had to be captivating an entire classroom full of people. And so over time, of course, as I exposed myself to that situation, I got more and more comfortable with it. Hi, became better at dealing with it. I discovered ways in which I could capture the students interests and attention. Discovered ways of communicating with them that were more effective. And so the same thing happened with my drawing. Every new thing that I drew, like if I was, let's see, what do I never draw? I never draw. I've never drawn a moose before. You've never drawn a realistic moose. And if I was to try and draw you a moose right now, I would completely fail very, very badly. And in order to be able to become an exceptional master at drawing moose, I would have to draw them a few times over in order to really get it. Especially to be able to draw them completely from my head. That's coming from someone who's been drawing for a very long time, for decades. So you probably get the idea. Now, practice. It's really what it all comes down to. And you'll get there. That's what's awesome about it. It's quite an amazing ability that the human species has. So I'm not gonna make the same mistake as last time. I'm not going to play C and an over abundance of contouring for the hair and keep it fairly simple. I feel like I kinda messed up the previous example by going overboard with all those strands of hair. So I'm just going to start out by breaking up the general clumps, goatee. And you'll notice that it's quite a similar process to what we went through. The full heads of hair that we looked at in the previous examples. So whether it'd be eyebrows, whether it'd be facial hair. You're always going to take the same approach. You going to define those general clumps first. And then you'll add in the secondary strands which will be thinner, subtler, and take less visual attention from the rest of the artwork. Alright, so again, very easy to go overboard with adding in these details. Try to be I would say, reserved the amount that you add into the hair. And you'll notice also here that I'm thinking about the whole form of the goatee as I work and that on the darker side of the goatee. So this side here, I've got more rendering. Well, more detail, you could say now what does that detail do? Well, the darkens the general overall tone of this form of this shape. So details can be used to also describe tone. And the more of a cluster of line work you have in any one area. More than that tone is going to be darkened. Well, that area is going to be darkened up. And you can see how I've actually describe the form of his goatee here in a much better way than the way in which I described this lovely ladies hair over in the previous example. Okay, great. Let's move on here. We'll lay in the outline for his brow. And these are fairly clean pencils by the way, he could certainly keep this a lot rougher and then just ink straight in over the top of it. And sometimes I will, usually I do. In fact, if the artwork is indeed going to be inked. Let's give this a 4k guys, some eye bags. Just for something different. Really trying to add some variation to all of those heads that we've done up thus far. We could also add in some folds, really increase the amount of tension around his nose. Sometimes when you've got an angry looking characters are the folds in their skin around the nose. We'll scrunch up a bit. Kinda makes them look like they're snarling somewhat. We can also add in a fold of skin around his nose. And you can see that all of these little details we're adding in around the face, add to his expression. They give life to his face. You think about folds really, what do they say about a character? Those folds usually have been created by all the expressions that, that character has been through. All of the, if you are someone who smiles a lot, smile all the time every single day, then when you become an older person, you'll have wrinkles that reflect all that smiling. You've done throughout your life. Now if you've found all the time like I do, then you're going to have lots of frown lines around your face instead. Okay, there we go. We've added in a nice outline around his face, shoreline his chin. We can also go ahead and describe the lower edge of his mouth muzzle. Some very subtle line work. This area. Like so. Wonderful. And then we also have his ear. So we'll draw that out. Add some nice shape to it. Actually, I'll undo that. I'll just get rid of some of these construction lines so that the top edge of the interior ear, the wire shaped piece of cartilage that's going to drop down there. But the little e, a whole covering want to add that in. Then the ear hole itself is a very, very complex portions of anatomy that are part of the face as a general shape that you can capture for them. Sometimes the way in which people draw ears is a very unique to their own style. So it's good to keep that in mind. Again, I'll clean up the year that I've done. They're just getting rid of some of that underlying sketch work that I've done. And then I'll tackle the next year. So I am going from one year to the other. And because that ear is facing away from us, so we can only see a little bit of it. Of course, we're not going to be able to observe as much of that interior anatomy as we did on the ear, which is closest to us. I'll add in some subtle line weights here. Make good use of line weights. Actus them, dial them back and forth to see what kind of effects you're able to get. Eventually this stuff, it really does. All click Place in some rendering around his teeth just to give them some form. And by rendering, I just made a couple of lines that we can add in around the F. And now let's get into the folds of his forehead. Okay, so we'll just add in some, some detail lines up the top. And we go, Actually it will take some of those out. And again, a lot of these folds are created by the muscles around the eyes and around the brow. We're just describing the wrinkles that they're creating. Again, assist, It's hence enhancing his expression. It's giving him more character. It also ages him a little bit. If you've got a character that you want to have make look older than just add more lines to their face. That's something that some people do unintentionally as they age their characters simply because they just put too many details in. Now if you want a youthful looking, especially female character than do not whatsoever, add line work. Like accentuate the cheekbones or anything like that on her face because it's going to age her immediately. And the effect of it will be very apparent very quickly. Okay, cool. So by adding a few more lines here, outline his brow. Outline the rest of his forehead. Clean up the construction lines with the eraser, just take those right out. Redefine that line because I erased half of it. Whoops, see, that's okay. And I'm just gonna get rid of some of these lines. Actually, I feel like this now too much there. So I'm always going back-and-forth on the decisions I make. You take away my eraser. Probably I would be in a world of hurt. Actually when it came to my art work, I wouldn't be able to fix all my mistakes. There we go. Let's give this dude a little bit of a different iris. We can give him like snake eyes. Like that. Yeah, that looks pretty cool. Wonderful. So now finally, we have his Mohawk that we need to add in and this is going to be very interesting. So what I think I'll do, again, we'll get that nice S-shape happening. Let's just start trying to construct the basic shape of it. With the hair strands, general clumps of hair that I'm pulling into shape. Actually, I don't like the way that's looking at older. So I'm going to redo it. And we'll just see how it goes. We'll hope for the best here. I don't know how it's gonna turn out. That can be scary sometimes, but it's totally, you know, he just keep moving forward and see what happens. Art can be somewhat unpredictable. Comic book God, especially. Usually you've got a, you've got a reference on hand for this stuff. But with comic books, the thing is, is that you've got scenes that you need to draw, that you're just not going to be able to find reference for every single time. But characters, interesting characters like this one that just not going to be able to find reference for at times. And so you've got to create somewhat of a mental model of who that character is and the places that they're going to visit within the story order to be able to draw it effectively. And sometimes that can be, it can be really hard to do. Alright, so that's his little hairdo. You can see it's a very stylish 4k. We could add like plants and stuff into it, but I think that'll take a little, little too long, so we'll just leave it as this for now. There we go, do some erasing around here. Then we will define what we've laid down here. So give these main clumps a larger outline or a thicker outline rather. And I'm going to break up those large clumps into smaller subdivisions. Trying to keep in mind what I managed to accomplish with his goatee. Again, I don't want to let want to make this hair too detailed looking. Otherwise it'll start to conflict with the less detailed style that I've established for the rest of the head. So I'm just gonna make my way around his general hairstyle and start to refine it. Breaking up those larger clumps, as I said, following the flow of their trajectory, the direction in which the hair is being pulled. And in this case it's being pulled in an upward direction. As we get toward the darker side of the hair do well, I'm gonna go ahead and add in a few more render lines to imply a darker shade. Darker overall tone on this side of the hairdo. Which will help to describe the form of the overall shape of it. And it'll help to describe it accurately. That's what's great about these, this rendering and these details is that in the end, they describe multiple things. They can describe texture, they can describe materials, and they can also describe the form as well. Once again, I'm going to pay special attention to the outline of this characters hairstyle. And really try to make sure that before we call it done, we've taken the time to polish it up. I'm trying to make those lines as smooth as possible, as polished as I can possibly get them. A little bit of time and care will allow you to be able to achieve that. I'm certainly not saying be overly precious about it. But I do think that you don't want to rush all your work. You don't want to get it over and done with straightaway. It's interesting because. I think that even I have less patients with my artwork these days funnily enough, due to all the, all the wonderful gifts that the Internet has given us. Or should I say, distractions. Our attention spans are just in general not what they used to be across the board. And so it pays to retrain your mind to sit down for an extended period of time, work on a piece of art and not be distracted. Just kinda meditate with it for awhile. Sometimes that can be really difficult to do if you are in the habit of, you know, constantly being stimulated by interesting things. Because make no mistake. There are some, there's some aspects of drawing that cause it to be quite boring and tedious at times. But if that's the case and you can only sit down for like five minutes before you need to get up and do something else. Take it one step, one little bit at a time, and try to extend that focus time to maybe ten minutes, an extended to 20 minutes, and then extend it to an hour and extend it to two hours. And slowly but surely you'll build those focus muscles up again. And you'll be able to put in the time required to actually achieve something spectacular because it does require a level of investment of energy and time that some people either have or they don't have. You know what I hear all the time from family and friends that I show my artwork to they go, Oh wow, that's amazing. But I'd never have the patients to be able to do that. I get that so often. Maybe you have as well from people who've looked at your artwork. Okay, so we've got our arc drawn up. Now let's just place in his neck and I reckon we can call him done. Quite a handsome looking. Ok, if I say so myself. You can suggest some of the muscles around his neck as well if we want. You'll notice I didn't do that on the female character. Even in real life. If you look at a woman's neck, especially a younger woman's neck, you won't notice any any muscle being defined on the surface of the skin. So especially in a stylized representation of a female character that isn't as old. You do want to try to make sure you're indicating the same thing. What will happen if you start to lay in the details on a female characters neck, then show simply start looking older, which is totally fine too. Okay, great. So here's our, our head examples for today. It's been a heck of a lot of fun too. I mean, it's really refreshing to be able to draw something which isn't just another idealized head. 6. Assignment: Thanks for watching. I hope that you enjoyed the class and that you've got a ton of value out of it. But now it's time to put what you've learned into action. So for this assignment, what I'd like you to do is go ahead and recap on everything we've covered throughout these lessons. And then using the same method of construction, head shape representation and facial feature variation, come up with your own set of unique heads. Once you've completed the assignment, submit it in the project section of this class for feedback. Good luck, and until next time, keep drawing.