How to Draw Superhero Heads

1. Drawing Superhero Heads Intro: I think the drawing from your imagination can seem like a very daunting process if you've only ever drawn from reference. And so I want to demystify that process a little bit. And I wanted to start with heads. Heads are, by far and away the most important part of the human figure, the most expressive and the part that we as humans relate with the most. I wanted to show you a very simple process to break down the human head so you can draw consistent heads from multiple different angles at Will. Hi, I'm David Fincher. I'm a professional comic book artists with over 25 years of experience drawing titles for Marvel and DC and many others including Batman, Wonder Woman, X-man, Avengers, and many more in-between, also dabbled in video games and films. So I've got a little bit of experience across a few different professions, bringing illustration and design work to different genres. I've always had a passion for teaching. When I started, I worked in a studio and I would work with young artists that came in in the same way that older artists who worked with me when I came into the business and I found the best and fastest way to learn how to draw is to have an artist that knows what they're doing and was willing to break down a step-by-step process to get you from where you are to where you want to be with your work will start with a very simple form. We'll map out where our features go on that form, and then we'll take that and start to maneuver it in space. So you can draw from multiple different angles and still maintain a very consistent look to your faces. And we'll cover simple sketching and then we'll take that simple sketch and we'll tighten it up into a tight line drawing. We'll add our shadows, we'll add our detail, our hair, our smaller details are crosshatching. And in the end you'll have all the skills that you need to draw a head from start to finish. But I hope this course provides you with value that you can carry on into your illustrating career or if you're just drawing for your own enjoyment. I hope this helps you get a lot more out of your work. So with all that said, let's get our pencils ready and get started. 2. Simple Head Structure: For this first lesson, we're going to draw a head directly from the front. And then we're going to draw a profile. And from a front view, I'm drawing a center line. And then I'm going to draw my head shape on top of my center line, trying to line it up as well as possible. I find drawing ahead directly from the front to be the most difficult angle of every angle. It's, in some ways, it's very easy because you're not having to worry about any kind of foreshortening at all from either side. But everything needs to be perfectly symmetrical and it can be a bit of a challenge making sure that things line up perfectly from side to side. And so the way that I tried to overcome that is I've got my center line and then I'm drawing evenly spaced lines around the outside here to make sure that I've given myself enough of a Guide to go from. And I'm going to draw a line from my forehead. And you'll notice that I've got a line from my eyebrows is not the isis is actually the brow. This'll be my nose. This'll be my chin in they're evenly spaced. And then I've got another another evenly spaced line for my forehead. From that I can start to actually structure My may face shape. So I'm going to draw lines from my cheeks, making sure that I'm lined up. And everything is relatively symmetrical. From side to side. I'm going to draw a line. This will be my line for me. My jaw line will be slightly higher actually for my mouth. My jaw line, I want to be here. I'm drawing the heroic face. And so I want that to be a bit of a lantern jaw. And so it's going to be just a little bit lower and wider. My ears line up between my brow and my nose. Let's just clean this up just a little bit. Just give my ear shapes in there and nothing too complex but just enough to get the shape in. My frontal forehead is just a little narrower from the front than the outside of the head, but not too much. And something that I find can be difficult is making sure that the actual atop the head, it doesn't skew one way or the other. And I think I'm a little skewed left as I look at it. So it's a bit of fun angling, looking at it. It's something that can be very helpful is just looking in the mirror. And I'm finding because I'm drawing this and I'm recording it, I can actually look up on my screen and it, it's almost like looking in a mirror and looking at it backwards, but it's a bit of a different angle and it gives me a bit of an indication if you just look at your picture and you don't You don't look in the mirror, put it up to the light backwards. That's the trick that can really work. Find a way to get a different view of it. You most likely will end up with skewing. And so from here, I'm going to draw a line right down the center on this side and then the center on this side. And this will be and that lines up with my jaw. And that's going to be about the center of my eyes. I want to have an eye space between my eyes. So I'm going to draw an eye underneath my eyebrow here. And then my other I will go here. And I'm using enough guidelines hopefully that I won't end up with distortion. So I've gotta put an ISPs there and then another ice base on the outsides. And that might knows straw in my eyebrows. So eyebrows are going right here. Just along my line. Obviously, they don't go perfectly flat. And my nose lines up between my eyes. And so there's my nose, my mouth. You know, I mentioned earlier that I drew a line just above my my line that I'm using my symmetrical kinda halfway between my nose and my chin. They use that for my jaw line by mouth will be just a little higher. And that lines up with the center of my eyes like this. So here is my basic And this is a real Andrew Lewis inspired head shape. And as I look at it, I can see it's looking a little bit off. And this is again, this isn't really the benefit of looking at something either in a mirror or backwards through the page that you just turn the page over and look at it through the light. Or I'm looking at it on my screen. It's enough to give me enough of a distance from it to see where it's a little distorted. And this is not a problem that I've run into anywhere near as much. I'm gonna, I'm a little bit inside the eye here. And see I've come off just a bit. Now a trick you can use if you're working on the computer and it's a nice trick to be able to use is just drawing one side of the face and then flipping it over. You can actually, I think you can even set programs, some programs to draw symmetrically. You want to be careful with that. You don't want to draw the whole thing to a finish symmetrically, it'll look very odd, but to just get things late in, it's a real challenge on paper. To draw a face directly from the front and get it right. It's just it's just a little extra for enabling to make sure that everything works from side to side and doesn't look distorted. That's my simple head from the front. And in the next lesson we'll go onto a profile. 3. Simple Head Structure, Profile: For this one, I'm gonna draw a ball for my skull shape. I don't normally do this from the front. I certainly don't do what I draw more of. Just what I'll do is I'll just draw a head shape. And then I can use my divisions and starts to refine it. And so you can see, I just ever find it this way and we'll go into that. But from the side I find it to be kind of helpful to go about it this way and to actually draw a full ball-shaped in, I'm going to draw a line right down the center of it. And that's actually going to be where the front of my year is, a year old project out back from that. And then downward from here, I'm going to draw my jaw. And that's going to go about it just to that line. And so now I'm going to draw a line with my brow that would be about here. The line for my nose here, and my chin will go here. My is going to connect right there. And let's lighten that down a little bit so I don't end up with a mess of lines. My brow is right about there. Let's draw in an actual brow. My eyes are just a little lower than that line. And you want to make sure to reassess them in your, you don't want your eyes push right out to the edge of your nose. Will get my nose drawn in on the nose line. And then I had a line that I didn't actually define, then I really should've here for my jaw. Just above that is where I'm going to put my mouth. My upper lip, my lower lip will be just a little bit inset from the upper lip. And you wanted to line up with your eye this way. A bump out again for the chin. I want to bring the warhead out just a little bit. This way. I don't want their forehead to receive backward into the, into the skull. It's a very strong head shape. So want to make sure to accentuate that. And I've got a bit of a because your head isn't perfectly around shape you, it's helpful to draw a line. This would be this line here. And imagine it as a flattening or maybe like a slice. So if you've got a ball, you're cutting through that ball on both sides to get a bit of flutter slice. That's the concept there anyway. And there's going to be my head from the side of my neck goes out really, really from the center of the head and your meter neck muscle. And now this is a how to draw a course, how to draw heads. It really is not an anatomical course. And so, and the truth is I'm really unqualified to teach proper real anatomy because I have never learned the names of all the muscles. I just have not found it necessary in order to learn how to draw them. And so this muscle here extends from the ear right down to the clavicle rate. So you've got your your clavicle here. And that connects right in there. And that would be that muscle here. And so there is my head from the side, there will be a profile. In the next lesson, we'll take our basic head structure and move it around in space, two different angles. 4. Drawing Varied Angles With Our Simplified Structure: So for our next lesson, we're gonna take our basic head shape, the one that we drew, a front view and a profile view of and start turning it in space. And so the way that I like to approach it is I'll draw a center line. Looking basically now I've got the head and kinda looking out this way. And then I draw my basic head shaped kind of around it. It doesn't need to be perfect because I'm gonna use my my dividing lines to make things more correct. I want this to be this to be an even length with this and then my forehead will again be my even light. So I've got four even divisions because I'm looking at the head from this angle, this side here is going to be longer than this side here. And the further you turn the head, the more pronounced that will be. I'm going to draw a line for my the back of my jaw line. And now I'm drawing this at an angle. So essentially what I'm doing is drawing a box that is like this. And so if I've got my division's allow along the front of the box, they would come up the side of the box like so. So what I'm gonna do is now extend those up. And I'm going to draw a central line for where I'm going to place my ear. The ear will go right here. My nose will be here, my eyes will be here. And here. I have defined in the shape of my jaw. And I've extended this line up here. So this is about where I'm going to want my job to go to the side of my job. My mouth is just a little bit higher. We're not going to worry about that for these views right now we will in just a minute, but just to get some of you use just the basic shapes working. I've draw line from my eyes there. And now my net comes out from basically the center. I've got this muscle coming up from where my ear is here. You find that year just a little bit better. And that's a bit of a three-quarter angle, slightly looking down. And so now we're gonna do a shot where we're looking up at the head. Again that I'm going to do an angle may be a bit more of an extreme side angle. And so what I'm doing, I'm drawing my basic head shape of this, my center line. And now we're drawing basically a box like this. And that's going to be the guy that we're using for this head shape. And so I've got an even division for my nose in even division for my chin, my forehead. You really don't see above the forehead from this angle. I'm going to extend my lines back, cross center line fold my ear placement will be. And so my jaw connect just right about there. And to draw a line through a game following this front angle. And that'll connect right about there to get the back of the jaw. Might yR is gonna go right here. And we'll get into the features in the second section of this course. This is going to be divided into three sections. We're going to do our basic head shapes. And then we're going to work on the features individually and then put it all together for a final drawing that we will all do together. I'm going to draw a line from my eyes here. And this will be about where I'm defining my jaw just right about there, about halfway through. And so I've got this muscly, I'm going to connect to here. This muscle connects here, could be the one on the other side. And that we're looking up at the face. I think I've extended it may be a little bit too far out to that side. Bring that in just a little bit there. Alright, for my next example, we're going to be doing, basically what we'll do is if this were our box, will be doing an angle that is almost a profile but not a profile and looking up at the box. And so because of going with something that's almost a profile, I'm gonna go ahead and just draw them on my ball in. Again. Here's my center line. My eyes will be here, knows will be here. My jaw line here. I'm going to extend my lines back. And I want to draw another even division between my nose and my chin. This'll be where my jaw connects to. And here's my center line from a year which will be here between the brow and the nose. And I'll find him as sheep for my cheek. Eyes go here. My job is going to connect right up through here. It might be helpful even to round these lines because it really, the head is around that it's not a flat shape and it can be a little bit. Let me clean this up just a little bit. And I feel like I was drawing that a little bit flat and it was fighting the natural shape of the face just a bit. So I just correct that a little bit. Now I'm drawing this is my angle from a feature. So I'm going to draw that same angle and connect it up here. For the other side of my jaw. Probably wanna round that a little bit, get a little bit sharp. Muscle connects again just under the year. And then we have something that's much closer to a profile and we'll flesh these out just a little bit more in a minute once we get a few of these drawn in. And I highly recommend that you draw as many of these as you can. Just get comfortable with this basic shaped structure. The more you do it, the more natural These will be common. And it makes drawing heads so much easier when you have a really solid basis to work from. Now for the next example, what we're gonna be doing is essentially it's going to be a box that will be like this. So this will be the top of our box. Bottom of the box and you'll see some of the side just like this. So I'm going to draw in my basic shape from my head. Here's my center line. There's going to be my brow, my nose, and my jaw, and I'm making these these are getting a little bit larger as I as I go. Divisions aren't getting larger as it comes down toward me because it's going to be foreshortened. And so if I did a diagram to the side, you would see that each one is getting slightly larger as it comes towards you. And that can help. Anything that you see in perspective obviously gives larger as it gets towards you. And your body is certainly no different. And so from this angle, it can be helpful to do that. I'm gonna draw another division now for my jaw line here. This is where my eyes are gonna go here. And now I want to extend downward on both sides. And so I'm going to draw my line here. This is one light year is gonna go and you can see it's very low. But if you've got your lines properly defined, that shouldn't be an issue. Now I'm gonna draw a line because we're looking at this kinda from the front just to line up our jaw. This would be the center of my eyes. So my jaw line is just going to go about there between them. I'm going to draw a line through here. Let's give this a little shape. There's an indent where it goes into underneath the brow is where the eyes. And now my job is going to line up just about here. And so let's get that lined up in there. And this is how you can go ahead. You can draw a, a jaw line in front below. It can be a challenging angle for people to get this kind of a head shaped working correctly. And just making sure to be consistent with your your divisions and then being consistently across with the sides of your jaw can eliminate that problem. Draw my clavicle, Illinois. Join up these big kind of landmark muscles between them. You got your voice box in their Adam's apple. And there's going to be a head Now, from this angle, the center of your neck actually comes up into the head just a little bit. So it's a little bit more shape like this. And we're gonna do one more angle and then we'll move on to some proper detail. For this last angle. I'm gonna do something that's a little bit more extreme like this one here, turned more to the side. And we're going to be looking at it from a downward angle. So as a box, what we're doing is, is the same. And so for a box which came off the page, topologies were going to be doing that basic angle right there. That's what we're looking for. And so I'm going to draw a central line. Always my most important benchmark. Here's going to be my brow and you can see I'm following basically this angle so and rounding it around my nose and my jaw. I can also, because I'm looking at this downward it would actually for short and down in this way. I don't like to accentuate that as much. I just find it can kinda weak in the face. So I'd probably use it, I guess in camera terms at different lens type. Just so I don't get that extreme for shortening, looking down, I just for my part, I don't think it looks as good and so I avoid it. And so now we're going to draw our lines coming up. I guess this would be the side of the box here, but it's front toward us. So let's give those in. I'm gonna draw my division halfway for where I'm going to put my jaw. And that's going to be just about there. And so I want my division along the center of the head from the side. My ear goes right here, my jaws going to connect here. And there's my head from more of a, a sidelong angle. And looking down at the head and the neck as a tube comes out of the head, the center of the head like this. And if it's helpful for you to draw it more as a tube, see, I get a sense of its dimension like this. Then I would recommend doing that. And then you can still, if you've got your year here, you can still put your landmarks on top of it here, meter, muscle shapes just to, and I'll do that here. There's my meter muscles. And now that we've got that done, in our next lesson, we're going to lighten these down And just to add some simple features. 5. Sketching in Basic Features: For this lesson, we're gonna take our simple head shapes with no features, is just basically are simple structure. And we're going to lighten them down. So we don't conflict with our lines too much. There's something I didn't like to do. I think it's a great way to work is you drawing your shapes. You use a kneaded eraser and then on top of that. Now you can use this as a guide to dry in your more detailed drawing. And so I'm going to draw another division. This is going to be where my eyes will go down the front of the face. And it's also very useful division or where your jaw goes and I feel like look at this, my jaw based on my eyes is actually off. And so I can fix that. And I've got an ice space between my eyes here. So here's one I here. Here's my other eye here. And we're going to loose and simple with these for now just to get placement. Here's my brow, My Brown on the other side, my Noah's connects at about eye level. So you don't want your nose to project a write out from your brow. It comes in. And so you get a bit of a shape like this. And then from here, your nose actually connects the base of your nose connects to that line and projects out from it. So that would be my basic nose shape here. And that my mouth. I drew a line just a little bit higher. And so I'm going to use that and draw my mouth between my eyes. So the sides of the mouth lines up. With my eyes. Clean this up a little bit more defined in my ear. And the idea of these heads is not to be drawing right now. To be drawing something that looks like a completed head. Nicely detailed right now what you're doing is you're getting your placement. So I don't want to and I feel like I extended a little too far out with my jaw line here or with my cheek line. So I brought that in just a little bit. And these are refinements that because I like to, for practical purposes, for drawing, I like to keep a very simple head shape. I find if I tried to go very, very complex and get everything perfectly mapped out, a, it would be impossible for me to draw heads to any kind of a schedule or a NAT kind of approximal wave for an actual comic book. And so I go a little bit more simple. And that actually can results in a few adjustments as I go along. Alright, we're gonna move on to this one here. Will be a light in this town. And I'm going to draw a line in for this will be where the center of this I goes right here, lines up with my jaw. This one lined up nicer. And then a center line from my other eye here. And so let me get my eye is drawn in. There's one. I'm going to wait on the other eye because it's going to be largely obscured by the nose. So let me get my brow in here. And my nose starts right here. If I were to draw basically a triangle projecting out, my triangle would line up with these lines. And it connects at the eye level there. So there would be my nose. And it connects up to the inside of the eye. And I can see a tiny little bit of that I and the other side, but not much. So I am not defining much in. And now I'm going to, I've got my line defined for my jaw. I'm gonna go just above it a little bit here and draw my ellipse between the center of my eyes. Finding my ear just a little bit more. But we're going to go into some basic structure for all of the features. So this is maybe just for the sake of some clarity, I'll make it a little nicer. So it doesn't look like a doughnut. I'm really, really trying to hold back from drawing any kind of proper detail on this because this is really all about placement. And I'm trying to paste this in a way that makes the most sense from that standpoint. And so it can be a little bit of a fight because it's my natural tendency to want to make everything is clean and nice as possible. So moving on, we're going to go onto this downward angle here. And so I'm going to draw a line again for my eyes just to make sure my eyes are centered. The other IRB over here, center line for my nose is here. And let's draw in an eye. And this angle you're seeing a much more flattened top lid and much more rounded bottom lid. And I'll explain exactly why that is in just a moment in another lesson. But for now, just be aware of that. My brow is much closer to my eyes because this space here is for Shorten downward. You don't see it as much. Draw my nose out from my nose line. My mouth. You're like my job kind of came in just a little bit there. So let's extend that back out to make sure everything lines up the way that I wanted to line up. Quickly finish in my head shape, get my ear a little bit more defined in here. There it is. Okay. My neck mer is an angle looking down at the face, defined in the side of my cheek line. Again, just like that. And now we're gonna move on to our Upward Facing angle from about a three-quarter view. Light modality. And again, it's the same process. Centre line from my eyes. Making sure my jaw actually lines up with that. I'm going to draw one i and here now because I'm looking up at this head, the top lid of my eye is around data and the bottom layer is very flat. Drop my other I am. My, my nose goes right here. And so easy enough for me to connect it and make sure it's in the right placement. Just by starting the top of my nose rich here between the eyes. Extending this out, following the same line is I had defined here or the bottom of my nose. And then connecting it, my mouth. It's going to be higher than this line. Again. Want to make sure. And because of the mouth is round and around the face just like every other feature. It rounds. And I'm looking at it from this angle, the mouth rounds this way. Same method connecting my neck. And something that can be helpful is to think of the eye, the entire socket as the skull shape would be basically like this. And so your IRS inside that that recess. And so here would be here it will be your skull shape for this face. This one would be like this. And so that's something I bear in mind when I'm drawing. It can kinda help me imagine that I'm creating. I'm creating a recess just like and the eye itself rests and be inside of that recess. And here would be my brow. My nose is, we've got one last example. And this is going to be our upward facing angle. This I find from helping people with their artwork, this tends to give people the most trouble. And it's relatively easy if you have it well-defined at this stage. And so let's lighten it down. I've already got my i is actually the center of my eyes to find in there. So that's helpful. So I can just start, can draw an eye in that shape in that place. And they should be fairly properly placed. My brow is going to go along my brow line. Might knows is going to extend upward. And this is part right here. Seems to give people a lot of times the most trouble because you want your nose to start along where you've defined it. You want it to end between the eyes here. And so it's simple enough to connect that if you think of it in those terms. But it can be very confusing because it's, I think it's a different angle than you may be used to drawing. And so it can be easy to overthink and let me just clean that up a little bit. I'm trying to define in my really basic shapes and I'm ending up with them a bit of a mass there. And so now the mouth I wanted to ride just above that line again, You're like, I'm actually pretty high there, so I didn't really bring it up as much as I can sometimes. My And I'll define it in my my eye sockets. I think that's a helpful shaved. Just to visualize. It's not something that I use when I'm drawing on a day-to-day basis. But just to visualize the shape can be very useful. Here's my jaw line. Let's see a little bit of the ear lined up on the other side. And here you won't see as much, but it should still be in there. Okay. So there's my mouth, I've got my basic face and define that in there. And that's going to be the end of that one. In the next video, we'll take three heads and then shadow them from the front, below and from the side to explore some simple shadow patterns. 6. Simple Lighting: Overhead Light: For this lesson about shadows, I wanted to draw three faces using the same techniques that we covered in earlier lessons. And the lighter phase from three very distinct different directions. Now I've already drawn two faces in that, and I'm just drawing in this last one. I was going to just draw these all off camera, but I thought you might want to see one of these actually being drawn. I'm going a little bit tighter than I did with some of the earlier examples. So I thought it would be useful just to get this one in here before we start with the shadows. So I've got everything sketched in and I'm just going over my sketch. Just defining my final shapes with a bit of a cleaner line in because I'm using the same head shape and basic structure for each had they stay fairly consistent and there are going to be a few differences here and there. It's very difficult to be a photocopier and just draw the same face unless you're tracing or maybe a little more consistent than I'm able to be. But they're going to be close enough. And the point of drawing so many heads like this using a structure that is consistent across the board like this, is to be able to draw your faeces from panel to panel looking the same, looking consistent, and making sure that you are drawing the same basic head from panel to panel. Now you obviously want to be able to change that up for different characters. But ideally, you want that to be a choice that you're making and not something that just happens because you don't have consistency in your under drawing. So I've just about got this one drawn in. And now we're gonna go ahead. And I'm going to start with my first head. I feel like I've gone a little bit wider with this one. There we go. Alright. And so now what's my first head? I'm going to use a strong lighting from above and I'm going to go very, very simple and broad with my lighting shapes for these. And so in earlier lessons, I showed you how I can define around my eyes using like a skull sort of socket. And so I'm just gonna go completely dark because I've got my letting from above. If I was to draw a profile, here's my nose. This whole area would be away from the light. And so it would be shadowed. So we're just going to shatter this whole area. And I rarely ever do this in an actual comic because it can make characters look very mysterious, which can be useful in some instances. But it can be very difficult to get across expression or any kind of nuance with such heavy lighting. So now under the nose, this is going to be dark again, I'm gonna go with a very simple shadow shape. And the nose is gonna cast a shadow down toward the mouth. And I'm going to need to shadow in here because between the eye is the ridge of the node is also angles. My upper lip is going to be shadowed below my lower lip. And I've got my cheekbones defined here, so I'm going to shadow a heavily under those. That's another place where rounds away from the light pretty heavily. Let me quickly shadow inside my ear. The cast shadow below the lower the ear lobe. I'm going to want to put a form shadow along the bottom of the cheap shadow. On this side, it's a match. And then the overall lip structure, especially with such heavy lighting, would really be shadowed all through here and in the recess around the mouth. And I'm gonna continue my cash-out or from the nose all the way down, pass them out. And the underside of my chin should be fairly dark. And now, it's very important. Your head casts an overall shadow over your neck. And so I'm going to draw a big shadow all the way down across the neck. This ride is just a little bit higher than down here. So I've lifted the shadow just a little bit there, maybe quite a bit. Just two and a lower this in here. And they're very simply, I've got my lighting in directly from overhead. In the next lesson, we'll move onto our second head example where we'll do an upward lighting. 7. Simple Lighting: Underlighting: For my second example, I'm going to go the exact opposite way. And this is more of a challenge generally because you won't see this as often in a comic, a light coming directly from below. It's just a less common form of lighting. And so the bottom might know, a bottom of my nose is going to be lit. And the top of my nose, the whole ridge is turned slightly away from the light, so I'm gonna go dark with that. Cast a shadow up above the nostril here. I'm going to want to keep this area light because this is angled down toward my light. Under my eyes here would be lit, but I want to go very heavy with my lived at my eyelid at the bottom because it's casting a shadow up onto the eyeball. And then the cheek turns away from the light toward the top here. My upper lip, I'm going to go very dark with again, the, it's turning away from the light upwards. In an order to do this effectively, you really need to know the turning of your planes of your face. And a few ways to do that. Using a light on your own faces is a great way to get to know that. You can find resources online where they show a simple MCAT type heads. Let that way I'm going to light the bottom lip or a darkened shadow, the bottom lip. I find with any kind of lighting, it's always a mixture between what you know and what you understand from theory. But also mixed with observation. That are always, always going to be gaps in theory. And you'll end up with something that can look a little bit less realistic then you might be hoping for just because now the brow up here slopes up toward the light. So it's going to be shadowed. And the top of my head will be shadowed. My ears gonna cast a shadow upward onto my head. And the top of the ear should be dark. And you'll actually get a bit of a shadow just above your Adam's apple here. Along the back of the neck where it turns away from the light here. Increase my shadow just a little bit. Can be a bit of a push and pull. And there's going to be ahead lit from below. And the next lesson we'll let our final example from the side and slightly from the front. 8. Simple Lighting: Classic Side Light: And now for my final example, I mean, what really is a much more traditional lighting for comics? And this is the letting we're gonna use. In our final lesson, where we'll draw an overall head from start to finish with rendering and lighting. Now this isn't really a shadow, this is just darkening and his eyebrows. So I want to shadow over the eyes, over the lid at the top. I'm going to go completely dark with this. I it's turned away from my light which is coming from this direction. The bottom of my nose will be shadowed. And you really want to just go through all of your features. I know that the bottom of my nose is turned away from the light in the whole knows is gonna cast a shadow this way. And so you just go through methodically and make sure that every plane is accounted for one plane at a time. There's a bit of a debit rate they're going to shadow I'm gonna shadow his upper lip and not completely because I don't want to be too oppressive if this lighting and they go totally dark there though, a shadow underneath his lower lip where it turns away from the light. And the cheek rounds away from the late here. So that's going to be dark rounds away there. And we'll just shadow in this whole area. And now my chin has this shape, not that shape. Let's do this again. My chin has basically this shape. Here's my lip. And so I'm shadowing up through to here. And so I'm trying to define that here instead of just drawing a flat shadow along the bottom of that, you really wanted to find the fact that it's got a upward curving shape like this. Give him a little pocket or shadow beside his mouth here. He's going to have some shadow pooled up around as a high rate here. And underneath his either the lower lid would turn away from the light so that'll be shadowed. The side of his head up here. Not too strong because it's mostly in the light underneath his ear lobe. I'll give it a little bit of a cast shadow inside of the ear. Feel like I've drawn here maybe a little larger than I'd like to, but and then the final real place where I could give them a little bit of a define shadow just on this cheek here. Something I really like to do just along that ridge. But having a shadow cast from his jaw line down over his neck is obviously very important for making this work. Bringing that up just a little bit more, bring that in. But if we shadow from the Adam's apple underneath neck, and there's basically my three light structure. I've got one coming directly from above, one from below, and then one from the side. Frontal. So it's not, it's not directly beside them. It's actually pointing at him. And this is really much more of a classic portraiture or kind of lighting that you're seeing here. And you can see the difference that they, these different lighting schemes make toward the overall feel of the head. In the next lesson, we'll start breaking down or features in more detail. 9. Drawing Features: Eyes: For this lesson, I wanted to focus on the actual features of the face and we're going to start, move over here on the page. We're gonna start with BI. And so your eye rests on top of an eyeball. Well, New Year I is the eyeball but your eye that's visible rests on top of an eyeball. And so you wanna think of, of an overall shape for your eyeball. This would be my center line for the eye and center line going vertically or diagonally. A draw, maybe a little. Just to help define it along the side. Obviously, I wouldn't want to cut that one. And right here will be my actual Iris pupil. And so there we go. And so now to draw my Islet on top of that, I'm going to connect. And I'm looking at the eye from a bit of an angle. So it rounds around that side of the eye just a little bit more and it's going to extend out here. You're actually drawing a shape on top of your drawing. That's like a draping on top of your eyeball shape. And if I was to look up at the I will before we do that, let's do a sidelong view. Here's my eyeball again. Vertical, center line, horizontal. My iris is gonna go here. I'll draw another ball just to, I don't know if that's useful definition at all, but we've drawn it in N. So now I'm going to draw my eyelid here. And it's going to connect like this. That's my actual eye in there. And here's my bottom lid. And now if I was to look up a BI, let's draw another ball. My horizontal line will be here, my vertical line will be here. So I'm going to draw my, my iris right here along that. Here's my pupil. And so I want my bottom lid to round around the eye. So it's going to actually round more like this. And my upper lid will round around it also like this. And so that's why when you're looking up at the eye, you get this shape. When you're looking down at the I, you get this shape. And it can be very helpful to think about it in these terms. And it can really help you place your eyes on the head at different angles without a struggle. And so there's my, I define looking up. And so now I'm going to draw one more example, and that's going to be this one right here. And I think it's probably self-explanatory at this point. But just to be sure, let's draw our centerline here, another one here, maybe a little bit lower. Make the angle a little bit more pronounced. And there's going to be my iris and my pupil. Let's clean this up a little bit. I'm getting a bit of a mess. And so my upper lip is going to round around like this. I don't wanna go to pronounce with it because it's still connects downward. And my lower lip is going to round heavily along that shape there. And so there's an eye looking down at it. And this is really the entire theory that will help you place your eyes in your head from different angles without it looking like they're oddly placed him and maybe painted on the head. In the next lesson, we'll take a look at noses. 10. Drawing Features: Noses: All right, and we're going to move on to noses. And for noses, I want to think in terms of a center stock. It's got a ball. I'm looking up at the bottom of the nose from this angle. And then it's got lobes that come off the sides like this. And so I don't want to, what I want to avoid that let's draw the other lobe and I'll just show you quickly something that I see quite a bit is I see noses from the bottom drawn like this. And so I've drawn two holes at the bottom of my nose. But because I'm just drawing holes, I'm, I'm losing the, the underlying shape and the sheep is much more important than the holes you're drawing. So you want to have that ball there. These are lobes that attached to that ball and you'll automatically get nostrils that fit in the nose properly, like so. And so now from the side. Well, we'll do the front first. So here's my ball from the front. Draw a line down the center of it. The bridge of my nose, right around the center comes out just a little bit, nothing too pronounced. And then I've got my eyes here. And so that's where the top of my nose starts to project out from the side. It would be this part here. And this would be where my brow goes here. And I'm going to draw my lobe like this. On either side of my nose, on either side of the center of the Coase. And so that would be my nose from the front. It's the same shape, just looking at it from a frontward angle. And you could actually extend a line through here, and this would be your plane change. And now from the side, I'm going to draw my ball at the end of the nose. And then my nostrils come off of that ball like this. Here's the center. This would be the center line here. And it connects like this. And here would be my plane change like this. And that would be my nose from the side. And it's, it's very useful to draw noses and use reference from different angles just to get a sense of your underlying form. The more you understand that underlying form, you can actually look at how other artists have defined noses and what were they place their shadows and what lines they choose to define. And you can look at it in an educated way without being confused by what is actually underneath. All right, for our next lesson, we'll take a look at mouse. 11. Drawing Features: Mouths: Now from our noses, we're gonna move on to our mouse. And so directly from the front, I'm going to draw a line from my mouth here. And so my upper lip has a center part shape just about like this. And then the wings of the lip extend out from the sides. And the bottom lip connects up in. So there's a basic mouth. And now looking at it from the side, I'll draw my guideline again. Here's my center bit. Ten the wings. And then I'm going to give it a bit of an angle. You don't want to draw a mouth fits perfectly flat up and down. It looks very odd when you do lateral, just sketch it in quickly and you can see that it, it ends up looking incorrect. You want to give it an angle downward. And this again connects up into this portion here. And so now I'm going to draw my seem central line again. And this time we'll be angling upward. And so I'm going to draw my center portion. Everything's gonna round around the basic curve that I've drawn as a guide. And then you'll see much less than the bottom lip because you're looking at it from below. And C, you see more of the ridge underneath the lip and less of the actual loop itself. And now drawing the same mouth. Looking down at it, I'll curve my line this way. Draw my center bit. Now the upper part of the lift is going to be very foreshortened. The upper lip. And you'll see more of the lower lip. And this portion here, this ridge underneath the lip, which I've kinda defined here, is very foreshortened along a tube. In our next lesson, we'll take a closer look at ears. 12. Drawing Features: Ears: For our last feature, we're going to draw some years. I'm going to draw an ER directly from the side and your ear has an overall shape. Just like this. Eight rounds a nice circle and then comes into a smaller circle below for your lobe. And then it has an inside ridge here. I like to give a little bit of a hook right here, and then a hook for the upper portion of your load here. And then you've got this piece here, the connection to the outside. And so now there is also a center portion. And that connects with, let me blow in it that connects actually to this piece here. Eyelid to overlap one piece over the other. You could just draw it as a, a simple shape here, curved, but I find if I overlap it gives it a little bit more dimension. And then the outside actually connects in here. And you've got your ear canal adjusting here. Now from the front. This part here you see more of and you see the round as it comes around here. Now this part here is going to be right there. This part will be here. And you'll see much less of the inside of the here. And I give it just a bit of a bump out right there and it connects in just like that. And so there's an ear from the front, from behind you. There's actually a little bit more simple to draw. All you really see is this ridge just from behind. And then the actual connection to the head. Just like this. And you'll find all of the features can be a little bit more complex from different angles. And I will draw one more angle of the ir. This is an angle that can give people trouble, certainly has given me trouble in the past. And so let me put that in there just as an extra, and this is going to be three quarters from behind. So essentially what I'm doing is I'm going to be drawing a head from from this angle. Here's my center line. This is the back of the head here. So my jaw, I'll just, I'm doing this quickly, but my ear is going to be here. And you'll see a bit of the back of the ear. And you see the connection coming in here. So this is really the angle that we're drawing for this last example. And so let's draw that ear sketch in my basic shape. And so because you're seeing the back of the ear, this ridge line here, you'd see much wider along the back. You'll see more of it. And then you would actually start to see the underside of it here. And it curves in just like that. Here's this portion here. And then the inside, this part here connects in T here. And I'm going to, instead of overlapping this way, I'm gonna overlap it the other way because this one is in front of this, I guess wing is in front of this one here. And now I'll draw some of the back of a year where it connects to the head. Now, truth be told, this here, what I'm, I'm drawing in here, I'm drawing like the underside of the curve and I'm not really defining that in any practical sense. I would always be shadowing out through there. So you wouldn't see it. And that is a bit of a cop-out, I suppose. You know, I'm saying, hey, I don't know the detail, I just shot away, but that is totally the truth. And in 25 years of 26, how many years of drawing comics I've never encountered a time when I've actually had to define it beyond that point. So that's what we're doing. Alright? So those are all our basic features and that's just our basic under structure that underpins the features of the head. In the next lesson, we'll add some basic shadows to our eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. 13. Drawing Features: Detail and Shadow: Before we move on, I wanted to take a little bit more time to lighten these down and actually put some proper detail on these. So you can see them drawn in a more practical sense. But ultimately the actual foundation is by far and away, the most important part of this whole process we're going to start with the nose is right at the center of my page. So let's just give that one to start with. And so I'm going to draw a shadow in for my, for my nostrils here. Actually really I should be defining in my shapes Before I go ahead and do that. And what's really important to me if I've got my lighting coming from here, I only draw one side of the nose. I won't draw this ridge here. I'm gonna draw a shadow just along the center loop. My connection here, there's a bit of a bump out just along the center. You actually have a bit of a, a shape in here. There's a bit of a ridge here. And this is a plane change. So I can go dark with this. I don't know that you would actually necessarily see any kind of a light underneath that Nostra, you probably wouldn't. But I find, and a lot of other comic artists, illustrators find that giving that little bit of a light there, can. I helped define the shape a little bit more than just going completely dark? So let's give this one darkened in here and give it a little bit of a shadow here. And now, because I've got my light coming from here, I'm gonna cast a shadow underneath the nose, just like this. Nothing too big. And that's always a decision. Just, you know, what your lighting was coming from, but depending on how much shadow you want, You, you can extend the shadows out more and make them more pronounced and larger, or you can make them much smaller and more refined. And for this nostril also, I really could just go completely dark with it. But I find drawing in too much shadowed can start actually obscure the, the forums. So we're going to leave that one there. And let's draw the one from the side here. Defined in my form is just a little bit more cleanly. This is more how it would actually draw completed form rather than these are all structure. And so we're bringing these to more of a finish. And so I'm letting this from above. And I guess from just about here, that would be my light scheme. One of my favorite artists, Kevin Nolan. And I've mentioned, I bet a live stream that I do every week. I mentioned them a few times in the live stream. Tens from the side to draw an upward light on the nose. Just because it can be a little bit more descriptive and it just works really well form, so you kind of sticks with it. But we're not doing that here. And so now I'm going to draw a bit of a cast shadow under my nose. And you can see I'm really reluctant to just go in here and just completely shadowed that whole area out. I'm gonna give it a bit of a light along the ridge here. And that's going to be my nose drawn from the side. One more. I'm starting to run out a little bit of room here. Dark it in the nostril here. This is just looking up at the nose. And so we're going to light this one again, just this way. So this side will be dark in here. Drop the center line here. In the same way that on the ear I did a bit of an overlap right here. I'm doing that here just to give it a bit, gives it a little bit of dimension. And I am very careful to not overlap. I knows. I don't want to just say, here's another quick example of a nose. I really could just, because I've got my light coming from above, this whole area could just be darkened. And that can work if you really want more of a, you know, if your joint punisher or something you want a really accentuated lighting. But for the most part, I find that can get a little oppressive. I have the same issue with eyes because you're looking at you're looking at a really a socket and overall socket. If you're lighting is from above, you really could just go completely dark with that, but your characters would become very expressionless and character list very quickly if you do it that way. So I tend to I make sure that my lighting is consistent and make sure that I don't break it and have areas that are lit and then areas that are totally shadowed right beside each other if it's contradictory, but at the same time I'll extend out shadow are all put in a little less Shadow. If it helps me to find my features and my forms a little bit nicer. So now we're going to shadow with a mouth here. Really kinda using a bit of a line weight I'm drawing a bit of a shadow to accentuate the center piece of my mouth. Shadow onto the lower lip here. The lower lip has a bit of a ridge that I really like to define. But you have to be very careful with it. You don't want to get carried away with it or a concert to anything that you'd get carried away with construct look very strange. And so there's my basic mouth. Now, if I'm lighting it from this direction here, I could actually go much heavier and darker with my upper lip and I'll do that now. I don't want to go completely dark with it. And there's a bit of a recess in here, but I'm going to shadow out. And on the other side too. And then underneath this ridge, I'll shadow like give me more of an overall lighting structure for the mouth area. Now from the side. And I really don't want to accentuate, I don't want to draw in my upper lines very much because these are rounded toward the light. And so I tried to keep that very lightly to find we're going to shadow underneath that lip. That's a rich phase and obviously away from the light. So alright, and so now I'm gonna go ahead and move on to my eyes and we'll do a couple of the eyes and then we'll move on. Using what I had is my sketched in structure. There's my eye shape. I'm drawing my iris in here. I'll give it a bit of a light here. A reflection is if I'm letting it from here. Now, something I really like to do and I find that it, it really can be very helpful is in order to recess the eye is I'll go much darker for the top and it's almost like a shadow. Well, it is, I suppose a shadow from underneath my eyelid. Just like that. And now I'm going to draw in my eyelid, this is the upper lid because it's away from the light, that's just going to be dark. I drew the actual because it has dimension. It's not a flat finish shape. It's actually got a surface. This comes away from the light a little bit, so I'll give it a bit of a shadow just under here on the lower lid. And obviously the brow is going to be just above the eye right there. And so let's do one more to our downward facing angle. And so I'm going to go heavier because I've got my light from above. I want to shadow down over the eyeball itself. I'm gonna give my little by little reflection here. Here's my iris, my people. Now my iris. And I'm going to shadow extra losing some of that. Lay them, they're just give that redefine. And now my lower lid, I'm actually going to see that ridge because it won't be shadowed. So I'll draw that in. That's a shadow just below it. Were turns away from the light. And my brow is going to be much closer to my eye because you're looking down at the whole area. All right, it looks a little sad. In the next lesson, we'll start work on the first of two finished head drawings. 14. Drawing a Superhero Head: In this final section, we'll be drawing an overall head using all of the things that we learned. And take this from start to finish, the way that it will be done on an actual comic book page. And so I'm going to go quite a bit larger with this and I wanna get a little more detail in. I've got my central lines coming down the center of the head. Just to finding my head shape around it, I'm going to draw a line from eyebrow, line for my nose, line from my chin, same way that I've been doing. And it defined in my closer cheek. My further cheat. Bring my lines up to round around the form. Redraw center line down the side that are defined where I put my ear. And I draw a line between these two evenly spaced and bring that up. And that'll define my jaw line right there. And very quickly and simply we have our head shape will draw line for where I'm gonna put my eyes. And we'll give him a neck, obviously. Alright. Let's clean up the top of his head just a little bit. Now that we have that in, I'm going to draw a central line between both sides. Let me find the shape just a little bit better. Line here. And you can see my joy is substantially off. So let me fix that, bring it out. And written that in just a little bit. Every line that you put in has to sit in relation with the other ai's. And you'll find that you can actually start to refine your shapes just by defining in more, more things. Defining him. Just by defining and more landmarks on your drawing. And now that we have our basic framework in and the lightened that down. And it's always a bit of a challenge to lighten it enough that it's useful for me to use, but also dark enough that it's still at least somewhat visible on the screen. And so I'm going to draw my eyes in where I've defined the center of my eyes, my brow. You know what? We're going to draw a superhero. And it's gonna be a little more angry. And to do that, I'm just going to lower down our brow will give him a bit of an expression. My other eye is going to line up right in here where I've defined my placement. I'm looking down at these eyes just slightly. So my bottom way eyelid, my bottom eyelid is rounded more than my upper eyelid. And between the eyes on when to start my nose. Connect that my nose connects right here along that line and find in my shapes. And now my mouth is going to be just above that line here. And I want to make sure it lines up between my eyes. And finally we're going to get our jaw line defined in chin. I learned a little bit from what I had on my initial drawing there. I think I wanted to give them just a bit of a bigger, he's a superhero. So I wanted to give them a bit of a lantern God. And I think I want to actually bring in this side just a little bit more and bring in the cheek in turn his head just a little bit more feeling like it was resting just a little bit far. And I'm a little happier with that. Now. I'm going to sketch in his ear. And I'm making minor adjustments here and there where I feel like something might be resting a little higher, a little lower, just not exactly where I want it. Top of his head. Feel like was coming off just a little large. The neck is coming out a little bit too far for me there to always when I put in my features and I get things more, refine their minor adjustments to my under drawing. And it's very, very important when you do your under Drawing to know that the better you're undertraining is, the less refinements you'll need to make. But be prepared to make those refinements if it's necessary and don't use any one stage of your drawing process as an absolute gospel for the wave of things need to be done because you need to be adjusting and observing and aware of what's working and what's not working in your picture as you go along. In the next lesson, we'll take our superhero head drawing further with some line weights and shadow. 15. Superhero Head: Tight Line Drawing: In this next stage, we're going to use a kneaded eraser e again, enlighten us down. Try as much as I possibly can to not light move to the point where it's not visible on the screen. And we're going to draw in our tight shapes for our head. If you're following along. This is where things start to get a little bit more fun. So I'm going to start with my eyes. Had been guys are the most important feature of, of a face. And so I always start with the eyes when they're working. I can work the rest out around them. Generally speaking, when I'm drawing anything, I tried to make sure that the most important part of whatever figure that I'm drawing is working first because I don't want to have an unimportant part of the figure really working. And then the thing that is my focal points not working to such an extent that I need to make major adjustments based on something that really wasn't important to what I was originally drawn. Detailing in the nose is lower live just a little bit there. I'm going to give them some frown lines. This one. Now for the mouth, I'm not going to draw that whole mouth, that it actually can start to look very feminine when you do that. But I'm using it as a guide. Draw. My final my final lines on it in the same way that I am not using my overall nose shape to I'm not drawing both sides of that knows I'm just drawing in what I need to make the nodes work. Defining his jaw line. Here. Here's a number of the most fun thing to draw and ahead. But when they looked strange, it can really, really drastically affect the overall feel of your head having kind of a potato eater on your head. So it's something you want to put the time into learning how to do properly. It's not a glimmer feature, but it's very, very important. And I feel that way about just about every figure, every feature of the body. Arms to me are much more fun to draw them feet. But if the feet really don't work, the overall figure starts to look a little bit silly. Get the top of his head and drawn in. I think for this figure, we're going to give him some hair. But to start with, I just want to make sure that my overall forms, everything is working. I'm gonna erase out some more of my underlying construction lines just to clean things up a little bit more. And they don't need to be entirely erased away because they're light enough that they don't interfere with the overall picture. Especially once it's detailed in. Alright, in the next lesson, we'll start to block in our hair. 16. Superhero Head: Sketching in Hair: I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to define a line for where I want his hair to be. And it's going to come from just about the center of the ear here, right up in through here. And connect the, around the top just right around. This is my brow line. I've gotta just below my broad line there. And that's going to be the line that I'm going to use to define where I place my hair as an overall sheep. I'm going to start my hair from here, just about the center. I'm going to wrap out some hair. So what I'm doing is this is a segment of hair here and I'm drawing the underside where it's connecting. And I'm going to draw another shape just like that here. So now I've got two broad kinda shapes. And now I'm going to draw one more toward the back of the head. And then on the other side. And I'm making sure I really want to make as much use as possible of my line of beauty. And that is a line that that has an overall curve one way and then a bit of a shorter curve. I don't think I've really, this is a bit more even, so, but it can really also just be an even curve like this. It's much nicer than just drawing a straight flat line. And so there's my basic airline drawn in. And so now with that, I can kind of erase that down and start to put it in detail. It's important with hair that it has an overall form and structure. And if you just draw individual hairs, you'll have something that turns into a bit of a scattered mass without any real rhythm or flow through it. But if I have that down, I can use that. And then I can break up the shape and draw hair here. And then maybe another one here. And I'm going to draw another one underneath. Kinda connects like that. Maybe I'll give it a little bit of a hook in the line here just to give it a little more interest. And I've really liked being able to layer in this way. I'm bringing up the underside of the hair and then connecting it up underneath what's resting above it. Now I'm going to go into my second section of hair. I'm going to draw a little underside on this one too. Maybe another hair kind of blowing between them. They're my line, a beauty line, just to give it a little bit more interests as it wraps around toward the back. Got a little bit of a hair floating up over here. In this kind of hair is something that I wish I could say, here's a tutorial, here it is. And now you'll be able to just draw hair. It's something that takes observation. There are artists that do it phenomenally, phenomenally well, and I highly recommend that you look at their work. I think Jim Chang is absolutely incredible at Hare. He's an artist that I recommend for it. Another artists that I think is, is maybe the best really at all time at this kinda hair is troubles, trust. And I would really recommend taking a look at his work. And I've actually not drawn in this section of hair here because I want to give him a mask, he's a superhero. So and I encourage you when you draw your own versions, to draw your, draw your own hairstyles. Draw your own masks, your own different types of look for the character and try and make it your own. And just have some fun with it. There's my basic care. There's no lighting on it yet, but we'll get there very soon in an upcoming lesson. First though, in the next lesson, we'll be putting shadows on our face. 17. Superhero Head: Shadows: And now I'm going to define my lighting in here. So I've got it coming in toward him. And from the left, a fairly simple in standard form of lighting. This is something you see most commonly. In generally speaking, it's a good way to light because it really doesn't carry a connotation necessarily. If you apply to face, it can make the face look really surprised and really alter the expression. And it's something that can be very, very useful in the right situation, but it also can really fight with the mood if you just use it without thinking about exactly why you're lighting from a particular direction. If you have characters in front of a campfire, for instance, then it can be effective and it can work. But otherwise it's not something you would commonly see. Nicole much heavier with the upper lid here. And again, on this side, we will be much cleaner than I did with my shadowed examples. So this is going to be a bit more of a process. This little area here on the eye. And I'm going to shadow the upper part of that. Get an eye shadow right in here. The lower lid. Define that ridge already kinda gotta defined on this side. And then give it, I'm going to give them a bit of a scandal. So when a defined in some of some wrinkles between his eyes here, I don't wanna go too extreme with it because of the point of this exercise is to show extreme expressions. This is very much a head structure exercise. I'm going to shadow inside isn't Osterhout and I'm really, I'm following. But from my basic lighting example that I did in an earlier example and following the same essential structure. I know that my nose is a major landmark obviously. And I know that my lightings coming at this angle, so I want to live away from my nose just like that. I could even there's a bit of a ridge rate here. So I'm going to drop just a little bit and then dropping there a little bit in that it gives you the feeling of being rich. And I'm going to shadow out for my nose. And now my lip is turning away from the light. I'm not going to shatter the whole nip, but I'm certainly going to shadow this side in, in here. So let's get that in now. And the connection between the lips would be a good place to pull up some light. So now I'm not drawing this line in at all at this point. I will define it a little bit more when it comes to rendering. But in terms of overall lighting, I want to be very, very careful with that shape. This whole area here would be fairly dark. So we're just going to darken that in. I'm going to shadow under the eye here. I don't want to pool up too much shadow into my eyes and I want to keep them fairly open so I'm I'm kind of coming at it. I'm filling in shadow and then not completing it because I can always fill it in more later without having to erase. But if I go to heavy than I've committed myself and I need to bring out the eraser and start doing some fixing. So I tend to under light and then build it as I go. For that reason. This turns away from the light here. This little bit of detail. I imagine what it is is just a bit of an eyelash casting a shadow. And I've seen it in photos quite a bit. And I always think it's an effective little detailed, but I like this. I put it in probably a bit of a habit that I overuse, but it's in this example two. And let's go a little bit darker with this whole area. Now that I'm starting to establish the rest of my lighting, it makes me a little bit more confidence in knowing where I want to put my lighting on features that I'm a little bit more afraid to obscure too heavily. I'm gonna give him just a few scour lines through the nose. Nothing too extreme, just enough that it looks, he's angry. He's a superhero. Which means he's angry. It's like a rule. Alright. Now, going to extend the shadow out. Shadow around his mouth for there's a bit of a pool light that takes her on this kind of a shape right here, bring it all the way out. Give them a shadow for his chin. Given maybe a bit of a cleft chin, just a little bit. Connect things up and make sure I'm being consistent with my lighting. Everything's working. And I feel like I've gone too heavy with the shadowing under his chin. So let's bring that back just a little bit. And this is a risk when you go too heavy, you end up having to erase, which is not the end of the world, but in so much as I can and I prefer to try and get it down properly the first time. I'm gonna go ahead and shadow under his chin right now onto his neck. And that's this shape here might adjust as I go along just a little bit and I draw it in the actual muscle detail for his neck. But just for now as a place holder, that's good for me. I want to shadow underneath this form here. That right there is going to be at my ear canal. And this overall form I think rounds, so I'm rounding it and I'm gonna do the same thing here as it kind of runs from the light. Casts a shadow underneath the bridge part of the ear, the outer part. This is turning away from the light. So I'm going to make the line just a little bit thicker. Again, this is turning away from the light, so I'm gonna make a line thicker. This also, but it's also going to cast the shadow just like that. That might be too much and we'll see how that works. And now he's got his cheek is defined just about like this. This is a about maybe just a little bit further and is about where I want to put his cheek. But I need to be very careful because this whole area is in the light and I really could just leave that, not gonna do that. But I am going to be very careful to not over accentuate. So I give them a bit of a shadow or just here. Kinda connected up. I know what that's a connect there. And he's going to have it just a bit of a shadow just to define his job muscle here. He's very angry, so use clenching his jaw and I wanted to find that shape just in there. Maybe it just a little bit more shadow here again. And that's basically my shadow structure for my face. From here, I'm gonna go ahead and shadow underneath the Adam's apple. And i'm just, I'm interlocking pieces at this point. I know that this muscle here, I feel like I brought it in just a little bit much that way. So I'm going to just adjust it slightly. And if you're following and it's frustrating because I'm making changes to something but you've followed. I do apologize, but it is a push and a pull at times. Shadow along this muscle here. Want to pull up some light in this area, bring down my shadow around this, and maybe round here because I've got a bit of a rounded shape right there. Got a connection here. This is going to be my trapezius. I think that's what it would be. Want to make it fairly pronounced but not overly pronounced. And just give it a bit of a detail in here. And define some of the tendon kinda muscle shapes just inside here, connecting up to this overall muscle. Not too much, but just enough to give it little interest. And it's kinda like a negative space drawing. If you can imagine, I've got here's one tendon and here's another tendon and another. I don't want to draw that what I want to do. And I'm gonna lighten that down just a little bit. If I've got it lit from here, I'm going to shadow under this tendon. And then as it rides over this one, I'm gonna thin it out quite a bit and then shadow again heavily and you can see it looks like it's riding over something here. When a shadow this in here. And this rights over it. So shadow where it comes out here. And now I've got another shape just up here. And a shadow that, and then casts a shadow over this shape here. And you can see how that starts at connectance you something that looks very, very dimensional and that is negative space drawing and something that is absolutely vital to lighting anatomy effectively. In the next lesson, we'll chateau in detail our hair. 18. Superhero Head: Finishing Our Hair: So from here I'm gonna go ahead and start lighting this Hare. And his hairs, actually gonna cast quite a bit of shadow down onto his face. But for now, we're going to start with hair itself. I want to make sure that the surfaces that are facing the light are going to be much lighter and the surfaces away from the light shadowed out down here are going to be quite a bit darker, but I don't want to go too dark with it. So what I'm doing is kind of using these sorts of techniques here and just defining in shadow just a little bit at a time. And it's a push and pull process for me to really make this balance and look the way that I wanted to look. Shadowing. Here. Let's thicken that line up a little bit, make that dark and that pushes that underneath. And a lot of lighting for these sorts of smaller shapes comes down to just line weight. It's all line weight under here, under here. Connect these up a little bit troublesome under shadow in here. And that's the hair connecting this way. And I try and think of an overall, I want to make sure that I'm drawing shapes through. As I go. I'm gonna connect those just below there too. And maybe you can go down just about like that. And I am just working my way back through the hair. And that the shape here, shadow shape here, this is all underneath this bit of hair that's writing above. Maybe a little bit more here. That's keeping it light and fairly area. I'm putting a lot of little shadow shapes in there, but I don't want it to look too dark. If I had very dark hair, then obviously that's what I would want. And I could have done that for this example, but lighter hair can be a bit more of a challenge just because you can't do that. So I thought it would be a better example to stay with something a little lighter for this smooth shapes just there. And you can see how it's really starting to define what is writing above and what's below just by, I can do that again here. And it slowly connecting it up and making sure to not go so far with it that it starts to. Look like what you want to avoid is a hair piece, Hare, Hare, Hare, Hare, Hare. You Really Want, You know, you've got a hair here and then another one here and another small one. And make sure to change up the, the overall shape and have some larger pieces of smaller pieces. And it becomes very much a feel thing. And this is something that I really hope to see. A lot of effort in the examples that I'm hoping that you will follow along and do because I think in the comments on the site, I'll be able to go in and see the way that you've approached this and see places where it's working and maybe places where it's not working. And I think that's the best way to learn this sort of thing is to make the mistakes and have somebody point out, you know, what, this is why this area worth and this is why this area didn't work. That to me is the number one. Quickest way to learn more. I guess esoteric concepts like hair or anything that doesn't have a defined, defined form. Like hair can be a little bit more difficult to get the hang of it because it's a rhythm thing. And I've never seen a tutorial who really adequately just breaks down rhythm in a way that makes it completely foolproof. I don't think that's possible. So you need to understand the theory of why things that are being done are being done and what's happening. But then you also need to play with it and learn balance. And so I wanted this part here, the ride just above this part. And so I gave it a little bit, a little shadow shape just in there. And then it kind of gives it that illusion. I'm gonna do the same thing here. That might be a mistake because I don't want to just I don't want to use the same shapes everywhere. But I think it was far enough away. I can get away with it. Just a little bit more in here, just to define the part. And that's gonna be my hair. And I'm still going to have a little bit of detail and rendering in there. But what I really want to get onto now is the shadowing under the hair. So I'm going to shadow, it's gonna cast a shadow down the side of the head here. So let's put that in. And I don't want to just draw a solid shadow, it's hair, so I want to break it up and give it that appearance of this piece here. It's going to have a pretty significant shadow coming from it. And don't be afraid to just go in there and put a nice big shadow right over your face from hair. You don't want to obscure important things like your eyes, that kinda thing. So if it seems like it's going to write over things that will make your face difficult to read, just cheap. Anytime you're lighting conflicts with readability, you need to find a way around it. So I've got a shadow cast downward. It's following my lighting from this piece down here. I'm going to shadow from here to here a little bit over here. Another piece here, little bit here. It doesn't have to be perfect. The point is to give you an illusion of this hair riding over the heading and casting a shadow down onto the head. Maybe there's a little bit more here is because this is furthest away from the light. And I realize I have forgotten to give him eyes. So let's do that now. I'm going to draw just a little dot for where I want his eyes to point. I wanna make sure that they look like they're pointed in the same direction. You don't want to draw your entire ion then go wait, 1, one's pointing over here and the other is pointing over there. So the easiest way to do that is just to draw a very small dot and you can refine it a little more easily. Now that I've got that in, I'm going to draw my iris around it. I'm going to draw a reflection shape just in here. And then make my pupil larger. I do this every time I draw faced. I'm going to shadow under here. Make that a little bit, little bit higher here. And that is basically our head drawn in without it. We've got our simple cartoon drawn in. We've got some simple line weight, nothing too serious. And that really it could be a completed. Before we move on, let me actually, I wanted to give him a mask and so let's do that. I'm going to draw just a line over his nose up through here. And then it can connect here. And then cut a hole for his eyes. And his eyes really is, is very similar to the shape that we're using earlier to define the eye sockets. And I am going to make his mass go all the way up to just below as forehead here. And I'm going to draw a line around his ears. It's gonna open up for zeros. And I'll give them a seam right here. And when you draw your own masks, feel free to draw your lines for your mask anywhere you want. Any kind of mask is obviously just fine. It's just a matter of defining it in a way you don't want your mass to fight your lighting unless you want the mass to be much, much darker than your face underneath. And that's another, that's another problem to deal with which we won't be doing today. But in order to make this mask look like it's really sitting on the face and not just lines drawn on the face. I'm gonna use my lighting Again. It's going to lift from the face just here because it's not going to perfectly conform to the shape of the nose and the cheek. So I'll just give it a bit of a line weight in here. That's just a bit of a shadow and you can see all of a sudden it looks like it's resting over the face instead of just a line on top of the face. Give it a bit of a thicker line here. Similar kind of a thing just in here. It's a bit of a, an indent there, so I'll just draw that in there. I'm going to shore up that shape rate in here. And that's going to do it. Now. Give it a few details. I wanted to have a seam along the IRR. Makes sure to refine this seam just up in here. Looks more like a seam and then maybe just up here. I don't think I'm gonna do that along this seam here or in the i because it is there. It could work, but it also could start to look a little bit busy. In our next lesson, we'll go into crosshatching, intake our image to a finish. 19. Superhero Head: Linework and Finish: So we've made it this far and now we're on the last stage of our head drawing and that is going to be rendering. And so what we're doing with our rendering is I'm going to draw a sphere. I'm going to shadow one side of it. And now I've got my light from here and I've got a shadow on this side, but it's a very, very hard shadow and I want to round across this fear. So my shape in my head when I'm imagining is this would be if there were a wireframe, it would basically look like that. And so what I'm gonna do is I, when I render it using a pencil, I scribble a bit to get a thicker BCE, and then I go very quickly out of it to get my thinner line. And that will, that goes toward the light. The slower you go, the more you'll find, your line will skip around. And you can see this one here kinda came off. That's something I would really want to erase. And you want to work on being as even with your rendering as possible and making sure that none of them come off line. You know, the basic shape you or your underlying structure and you want to follow that. And you wanna make sure that all of your rendering is evenly spaced. And you don't ever come off like that. It will completely destroy the illusion that you're trying to create. And that really is the very basics of rendering. And as we draw, the face will run into some other particular situations that we will cover. But for my cheek here, it's going to essentially follow that rule. And so let's start. I want to start very small with it here. And then it formed round in the forum softens as it comes up in through here. And so I'm gonna go a little longer with it. And the longer you make your lines, the softer you're making your transition. So these, this is a sphere, it's very, very soft and long. If I have a tube, transition is going to be much shorter. So I'll draw these much more blunted and short. I don't want to go along with them because it would round to fire around that tube. And a very good example would be something like like this, where shadowing here away from the light. And then I'll shadow here. And this is a much steeper transition. So this one is going to be much softer following my form around that want to make sure that I know what my overall form is. I can't deviate from that. If I started coming across or out this way, it utterly destroys the rendering. You need to be very, very careful about that. And this one will be much order because it's rounding around a much steeper form. And so that looks correct. If I was to go very long with these, it would start to actually look like a detailed even that wouldn't really read like rendering. So I'm going to be very careful when I'm doing my face to not let that happen. So now I'm going to start on his chin that this is another nice being soft shape. I have got an overall kind of a form that comes through here and I want to make sure that my rendering all connects and works together. It's not just a, I want to not have patchy rendering, a big patch of rendering here and then empty here and a patch here. The whole thing needs to connect as an overall hole. And so to make sure that that's as effective as possible, I know that I want to flow along this line because this is a line of the face that is very useful. So I make sure that these lines come up and don't fight that I don't want multiple lines going in multiple directions as much as I can possibly avoid. And so now with these lines, I'm going to come up this way and they'll connect across all the way down to here. I don't wanna go too heavy with it because it's not a very, very defined ridge. And to be honest, I'm actually, I'm drawing this and I'm thinking, you know what, I'm going to take advantage of these lines. And I'm going to bring these up just a little bit more and make sure that they flow along with that and that works actually a little nicer. Now, I wanted to find an overall of a plane change on my face here. So but I'm making sure that this is all flowing together and it's not multiple lines going in different directions. I'm gonna give him just a little bit of rendering under a jaw here and connect that up. And now for his knows, this is a much sharper transition. So I'm going to be very, very blunt with this. I actually could just leave it alone completely and maybe that's more advisable. And that's a decision you really have to make. But you want to be able to make those decisions based on an actual theory, but you understand. And so I'm going to define some sheep and his nose. I really like going with this kind of a, instead of just drawing a line and maybe another line connecting it up like this. It's a nice inking technique that can make things look very clean and defined. And so I use it when I can, when it's appropriate. And I think where it's appropriate is this is, this is a shape that's really much more into the light. I don't want it to be dark. So I wanted to find that cheap but not shot wit. And so that's why I've done that. There. And so now I want to, there's a line going all the way from here down in through here. And the cheek actually rounds down this way and then comes back out. So I'm going to define that line this way. And I'm going to bring it all the way back up through here. Where when we were drawing our face, the original shape of our face, we came up and that went like this. This was the shape that we defined as are under drawing. And I'm going to use that. And I don't want these lines to be blunt at the bottom and then straight. What I wanna do for these, these ones are going to have a bit of a thicker portion go up this way and then down that way. And that way what I'm doing is defining a bit of, a bit of a dip without cutting it off. And I'm coming up just along the outside of my cheek here. Being very careful because I'm really in the light right now. So this is something that you need to be very aware that too much rendering or line worker shadowing in the light will destroy your picture. It's actually a bit of a lighting pattern thing, but I need to be aware that that's what I'm doing. It's not really, it's maybe more of a stylistic thing. And while I love style for rendering and I think it's really important to study different artists and their rendering patterns because there are so many different techniques that can really work. You want to be very aware of wondering when you're using something that stylistic and not be overdo it. Now, this is a smaller, warm, I'm going to round this up to the light. Met just a little bit here. I don't want this to be two pronounced just a bit. Little here. These are, these shapes are much more harden like this. So these are going to be very short and blunt. I could actually just leave us alone to this is going to be a bit of a software shape here though. And as they get more toward the light here, I'm gonna shorten them down. I'm going to give them a bit of a ridge along here. And the way that I'm gonna do that is a shorter, quicker and quicker, shorter, more blunt. And now I want to define is brow line. And I'm gonna do it similarly to this because I don't want it to be too accentuated because it's very much in the light. So I'm just going to use some kind of pattern shapes. There's one there. There's one. And it gives me that without blocking that Arianne and being too dark, little more rendering above his nose here. And now I'm going to soften this much softer area with a bit of a longer stroke. I'm gonna do the same thing here. Little undefined in there. So let me just clean that up. You'll find Azure penciling. Some things just are not as defined as they need to be. And you really want it to be a, it doesn't need to be utterly and completely neat. Especially if you're working with an anchor. But you don't want to give you incur problems where they're just trying to figure out what it was that you were thinking at any given time and they just can't tell what's in an area and they end up having to figure something out themselves. And sometimes that's not really what you are looking for and that's how you end up having fights with anchors that are totally unfair to tinker because they cannot read your mind. So you want to be as defined as u Catan. Leaving a bit of a ridge here too. And I'm going to, with this line, I don't want to just completely go with a render because there's a bit of a wrinkle, each kind of a pattern on the lip and not too much there, but just enough to give it a little bit of texture in here. Render this uploaded light, and give this a bit of a range. And this one, what I'm doing is I'm softening. I've gotta shape here. I want to soften it out, not even toward the light, but just up and out. So I'm going to just go along this. I'm going to give them a bit of a definition there and then I can come up toward the light here. And I want to make sure I've got this defined already. I don't want to fight. It hadn't wanted to be a different angle. It's gonna give me trouble. So you can see I made sure to follow that basic patterning, but I had below, I don't think it was perfect, but it was close enough that make him a bit of a line here that again similar to this, wanted to find something in there that kind of a shape there. But not too heavily. I am going to leave this area open. I could render out through here my experience. I have never liked it when I've done that, so I leave it alone. And that's the kind of place where it really becomes an experiencing. I think based on what I did here by all rights, it should be rendered there. I just don't like it, so I don't do it. Very broad form here. Under this ball kinda shape. Just like that. I'm going to do this quite a bit. What I wanted to do is kill that area just in there and indent it, but not go totally dark with it. So I just used that is basically just a tone. I don't really tone with my rendering very, very often for the most part, it's always, it's always a transition from a dark to a light, but sometimes I'll use it as a tone. And for me it's experiencing, I try it, it works or if I see somebody else do it and I like how it works, but I really try not to give myself rules as much as I can. I want to understand what I'm doing, have reasoning behind it. But then if if there's a particular situation where I think something's going to work, I will break that rule and try it. Because why not? I'm gonna give him a bit of a wrinkle here. This is the place where his head would bend naturally. So a bit of a sheep through its profile, they're just give it a bit of a wrinkle and give it a little bit of a reality. Something I like to do. Just a little bit there. And I'm doing the same thing there, want that dark, but not all the way dark. And so now I'm gonna go ahead and just render through his hair a little bit. This is essentially just drawing kinda hair detail. A little bit here. Little more shuttle around his mouth. Alright, I think we're going to call that done. That is our completed superior hero ahead from start to finish using all of the techniques that we learned from lesson one all the way through to the end. Hopefully, you got a lot from this course and this was enjoyable for you. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you all have done with it. I can't wait to see the samples that you do. And especially some of the problems that you run into. And I'm sure we can work through those together. Thank you so much for watching.