How to Draw the Planes of the Head

1. Introduction to this Class: Hello everyone. My name is Robert Marzullo and welcome to my class, Drawing the Planes of the Head. In this class, you're going to learn how to define the planes of the head. And this is going to allow you to rethink the head, approach it from a more designed way of thinking, a structural based approach. We're going to be using the Andrew Loomis head to start with and then I'm going to show you how to further develop that into secondary planes and transitions. And then we're going to work on up and down views of the head to help you relate this information in a more perspective based manner. This class should be highly beneficial for anyone that's trying to get more depth and dimension in their face drawings. I hope you enjoy the lessons and let me know what you think. Good luck with your art and bye for now. 2. Basic Shapes to Practice: Hey, welcome back. Now I want to talk to you about drawing the planes of the head. But before we get started with that and actually drawing the head and talking about like the Lumis method and things like that, I want to first get you warmed up to the idea. I've established a grid. It's just something my software can do or it can put a grid in place. You can draw one out. You can use grid paper. You don't have to do this, I recommend it. I think it helps me a lot with things like symmetry, alignment of features, just consistency in the drawing and not having to think about that portion as much. And it's just more of the design way of thinking. Right. When we get into drawing these shapes, you're going to basically start with angles and you're going to build out from there. What we'll do is we'll just draw a couple basic shapes just to get you warmed up. You can look at this like it's a pillar or something like that, but just some straight lines and some angles dealt at the bottom. And then trying to perceive how far out those angles come out. And then a line to the neck. If you were to draw a line through the center, you're trying to basically perceive a sense of symmetry and balance there. There's going to be elements of that, but then as we move through the process of the face and the different elements, you're going to use like a lot of triangular like shapes. You're going to taper things out essentially. If this was the start of a nose for instance, you'll see that we're going to be using Keystone like shape like this, the top of that pillar. Then as we come down we're going to widen out the bridge of the nose. And for a very simplified version, we'll just flip that shape back the other way. Just like that, we'll have the start of the bridge of the nose again. These are very basic concepts and if you feel bored you can move along. But I do recommend you practices get warmed up. It's going to make sure that when you get into the more advanced versions that you're ready to go. These ideas are already cemented in your mind and you feel comfortable with them. From here, what we'll do is we'll take even this basic shape and we'll relate it in a more dimensional manner. Right now it's a two D flat surface. Couldn't get any flatter, right? Just some flat shapes. Then as soon as you bring these lines back, this way you start to get a sense of perspective. If you bring this down, widening it out just a bit, and then trying to be even on both sides, a sense of symmetry to this effect. Then from here we could bring this up by establishing this angle, we give the impression of a nose. But you can see it's a very simplified version. What I'm going to be showing you is the simplified versions of some of these aspects of the face to, again, hopefully get you to feel more comfortable about these concepts. But then I'm going to show you how to go a little more advanced with it. One of the things you're going to notice when you study planes of the head from various artists is that not only are there certain masters that have taught it differently throughout history, there's also interpretations by a landslide of different artists today that pick and choose what resonates with them, what they utilize in their own work. You have to remember that you have simplifications, you have more advanced versions and everything in between. And there's no right or wrong way when you look at this stuff. It's not like these are rules that you have to follow. These are guides and these are suggestions more than anything. Some people, their technique is going to make more sense to you than others. You need to probably just keep an open mind is what I would recommend to all the different techniques. And then you're going to use what you use and you're going to discard the rest. We can't possibly remember everything we learn, right? So that's our brains function, is to only keep what we need and we use on a more day to day basis. And then some things we use so much that we no longer even think about using them, right? We don't think about breathing. Essentially profiles are also a good example of practicing these angles and noticing different relationships that we're going to be drawing. For instance, if we look over at this area here relating to this is basically right here. It's that down slope, that bit of a triangle. The bridge of the nose really, it's like, I guess the bridge, the nose at this point would have to come back like this. I might be getting that wrong, but forgive me if I am. You see, even here by adding this extra angle, I've done something a little bit more complex than what I initially started with. I didn't really mean to do that, but just think of this stuff as you're trying to envision all these shapes in a variety of manner, a variety of ways. For this one, I'm going to go a little more complex. There's the nostril, there's another plane change. And you'll see some artists, they do a tremendous amount of plane changes just in this area of the nose because there is a lot going on there. It's really hard to even think of this as a nose, right? It's a little too simplified, but there are instances where that's beneficial. Now, one of the things I really like about studying plane changes as well is that you're also learning how to make simplifications that may result in style choices. I didn't see that at first. I thought, well, it's, it's a great technique for getting perspective in the face, which it is. It's a great technique for finding the value shifts that you need, where to put light, where to put shadow. But also I started to realize that, wow, this is like style choices, like when you see very angular styles, this is similar to some of the decisions they might make. There is that little bit that you can gain from it as well. Then I don't know if I mentioned it, but I'll say it again. If I did really consistency, this is going to help you immensely with consistency and a sense of structure to the face because if you have that in, I don't know, like whimsical or flimsy feel to the face or your character's faces look a little too mushy, right? They just, they lack a sense of foundation and structure. Well, this is going to help with that as well. Now, another thing that couples with this is also, you know, studying the skull and being aware of the anatomy and things like that. But really for structure the skull and the plane changes of the face are really going to help you with that. You see, we've got some variations in the nose here. Let's do a couple other. I just want to get you warmed up to these concepts. I'm going to do a mouth and I'm going to start with an M for the top lip. Now remember two, you can add a center line. It's never a bad idea. I probably will bounce back and forth from using some symmetry tools as well. I don't want to do a whole lot of that because I'd rather show you how to draw as much freehand as possible. But I do recommend that at times just to mimic it, you would just obviously draw half of it, flip it over, and then check it. Just so say you flip it, right? And you're like, well, I just cheated. I don't feel good about that. I want to really not take those shortcuts. One thing that you can do and you can see just like that this side is longer, right? It's just one of those things that I have to notice and pay attention to in my own work. Well, sometimes I flip it, turn the layer back lighter, and I redraw over top of it. And I feel like that's another good way to slowly bridge the gap. It's still cheating a little bit. You know, I don't know when there's deadlines, I throw cheating out the window. I just want to make sure that you're aware of that. Like if you haven't worked professionally yet in these things worry you, believe me. When you have a tight deadline, you take the shortcuts you need to to get stuff done. Don't hinder yourself that way of thinking, but when you're studying, when you're trying to improve your skill set. Yes. Trying to do as much of it freehand is good mileage for you. Obviously we got like an M like shape here. Are you like shape here? All right, And that's probably the most simplified way I could think to draw a mouth. And then as you develop it, you might get more of the angles in here. For the Lumas method, he does something a bit like this. You can see that keystone shape, again, even in the lip, you see it's similar to the center of the nose over there. Then he really flips it back and forth. And we'll get into that here in a bit, but just really should keep it about the mouth at this point. You see upside down right there, and then this angle on the sides here for the top lip, then for the bottom, you can really just bring this down. And then connect it back here. Now I will introduce some curves along the way. So keep that in mind. It's not like every line has to be an extremely straight line. For the most part, yes, that's what we're trying to accomplish here. But I guess I bend the rules or bend the lines a little bit, I don't think you need to be too awfully critical about that. Then also for more accurate noses, as we get into stuff and we start drawing a little bit more, what I would consider more accurate noses. You're going to have a few angles here as I've already mentioned. And the wings of the nostrils are almost always up higher. Most noses, not all noses are one of those areas where we get a lot of shape variation, a lot of size variation, right? But generally the hood and wings of the nostril are up higher. Something like that. Probably even another transitional angle right about here. So a question you y be having is like, when do I know the difference? To do more or less detail? Essentially, what I would say to that is it's better to start with less detail as you're learning, as you're beginning, less angles, more simplifications, right? There's a natural progression as you just get better, that you can implement more, there's that. The other part is what are your goals? What are you trying to achieve here? Are you trying to draw stylistic characters? But you have a little bit of a struggle with staying consistent with the characters or really drawing things symmetrically, all those things. And that's a consistency issue as well. Mapping out space and proportions, even. Are you trying to draw more stylistically then you could probably stay to a more, a lighter version of the angle interpretation. The planes less planes. Are you trying to draw more realistic portraits then you're probably going to use a lot more planes. In fact, that's really where I find this stuff is more superior. Because now you're talking a lot more about gradients, light and shadow. And this becomes insanely powerful for that because there's more clear distinctions on where the light and shadow would be. But if you're drawn organically, it's just a little harder to discern. Right? It's not impossible. And I've actually got that crooked away from my center line. Look at that. Don't make that mistake. Hopefully didn't. But yeah, it's one of those things where you're going to add more of this as you need it for more complex illustrations. That's predominantly the way that I think about it. I think we got time for just one more. I'll do a quick one. I'll just be the ear. Ear is super basic for what we're going to be doing in this instance. And it's just going to be basically a disc like shape, if this was on an angle. And we'll show the front plane change of the area that's closest to the head. Then the disc shape will just bow out. And you could do that at angles as well. You could cut here, cut here, cut here. Some people do it very angular, all the way through. Again, it's up to you. I don't do that entirely. But maybe I should just, I guess it is neat to you'll see some of this. This is more, I utilize this effect on a mapping distance for a portrait. Maybe I'll explain that in some upcoming lessons. But essentially you'll see this a lot with portrait artist is where I learned it. Where you actually draw outside of it with angles and you see these little criss cross divides. You can do it that way as well. Something like that, simple as it is, gives us an ear. Then again, if we were trying to be more complex about it, we would start looking at the forms inside of the ear and interpreting that with more angles, trying to find those plane changes as well. We'll go and stop right here. We'll head over to the next lesson and continue on with that. Let's move forward. 3. Basic Head Shapes: Welcome back. Now I want to give you some other preliminary warm ups. And that's basically drawing a more simplified version of the head. Again, I really want you to think about the concept that you don't have to draw the more advanced versions you can if you find it necessary. But remember that you can also result a lot of this down to a basic version. I'll show you this one on a forward facing shot. First we're going to start with our circle slice off the sides. Bring that in like this and we're going to find the one third that we need. Just divide up the sides. You can't quite see the vertical line here, but it's there. Then bring that line over horizontally and find your one third. You're using the top of the oval here, the bottom of the ovalproximately. The main thing is that the one third here is relatively even. I always get people to ask how big to make the oval. I don't have a set size. I just feel like if I make it bigger, it's obviously going to cut further into the circle, which is going to make the head thinner. Likewise, if I make it smaller, it's going to cut further this way to the head size and make the head wider. I play around with proportions a lot. If you feel like it starts going astray right here, and the one third looks funny to you, more elongated than it needs to be, Just bring this back out, widen it back out a little bit. I tend to try to think about this stuff and teach it in a way where it's more fluid, not so strict, and everything's perfectly concise. To me, that's a way to start drawing robotic looking faces. Even though in this case we are going to be drawing faces that look like robots. That's the goal at this point. Right here, we've got our one, three. Let's go ahead and add the jaw line. So we're just going to drop this down a bit. Bring that to the chin. We'll just establish a chin with a flat line. So we've got a very squared off jaw. And I feel like there needs to be a little bit more taper here. I'm going to round out the head, even though this will be more angular, I'm just trying to get, there needs to be this feeling that the top of the head is bigger than the jaw, right? You could probably even cut that with angles, but I'm just going to round that out now we can get rid of a little bit of the construction lines here. I will make that a bit bigger for you. Okay. So now we have the placement for the brawl line. We know the hair lines up here and the nose here, and the mouth in this space down here. What we'll do is we'll start with this shape as we've done a couple of times now, Keystone like shape. We'll draw the bridge of the nose, we'll flip that Keystone shape. Actually, I'm sorry. It's the same shape. It's just we'll squatt here from left to right to keep nudging over as I miss my center line. Constant problem in my work. Sure. You see some of those in ears right. Let's bring this line back then. Let's drop this down. We've done all this before in that previous lesson. Little triangles here for the wings of the nostrils. Now we've got this nose in place. This again is the realms method. We're going to do the simplified version first. We're going to angle this line back to here. As far as placement of this, what we're just going to look at is that if we were to think about this transitional area right here, that needs to coincide. I just think of it like the temple area of the head. And then bring this line over to that point we brought back towards the face. The ears will go in this quadrant. Just remember, the ears line up to the brow line and the nose, they're in between those two points, the eyebrow line and the nose. I'm trying to induce a little bit of perspective here. I'm not going exactly to the bottom of the nose. We have this feeling that we're looking a little up or the head's tilted down just to smidge. But I will do that. I'm not going to draw insanely big ears and put them right parallel to those points. There we go. So it's a bit messy, but I'm going to clean it up. But one last point I want to show you is we'll take right where the ears pretty much connect. Not quite the center point of the divide up here, but where they connect to the head. And we'll just draw down to the chin. There we go. So I'm going to clean it up a bit, but what I want you to see here is that this is a very simplified version of the planes of the head, but for a lot of artists this will do the trick. I'm also going to show you some variations away from the Loomis method and let me know what you think. I hope it doesn't confuse you as we go. But again, what I want to do is arm you with more knowledge, not less. And I also want to be honest with you in the way that I actually utilize these techniques. I don't stay wholeheartedly to any one of the, the popular taught versions like the Asaro head and the Lumas head. I study them as often as possible. Maybe some of it is just an inability to utilize it to its full potential. But I feel like at this point and juncture of my abilities and how I use it, it's just not as necessary. Hopefully, I'm being very forthcoming with you and saying, okay, look, this is how I do it. Hopefully this applies to you, but also I don't want to blow any smoke your way. I don't want to tell you, yes, this is the one right way to do it and this is the way you must do it. I don't feel that way. Again, take it with a grain of salt, learn from it, and utilize what you can from it. There's that cheekbone line. Now there's certain things that I just feel are going to be across the board, accepted. This one is a prime example of that. This line going down the side of the face, it starts pretty much where the zygomatic bone is, right? That's what we're looking at. That cheek bone, that jaw line, or cheekbone, obviously this is on pretty much everybody, right? There's nobody that doesn't have cheekbones now. They might not have as defined cheekbones. It might not be something that you want to bring out as much in your character concepts as others, but they're definitely there and they're definitely consistent with all the methods of drawing the plane changes. They just might work around them differently. Some plane changes, you're going to see where they do more of this and they draw these mini triangles and they really divide it up. But again, we're going for the more simplified version at this point. This is a keeper. I would say that's a must. I would say even the nose here, even though it's super simplified. Just the benefit of getting good at drawing it like this, I don't know. It really helped me to think more dimensionally about the nose. I noticed that immediately after I started doing this that I was like now drawing the nose more distinctly away from the face. That's something you'll see with a lot of beginner artists that they draw pretty well. But then they maybe flat noses or the eyes don't look like they are recessed into the cavities of the face but rather just stamped onto the front of it, things like that. And I feel like these studies help you with that exact aspect of your work. Now remember that these are the basic planes of the head. We'll be approaching it from secondary and adding more angles and more complexity. But I just want you to feel comfortable with this. Keep in mind, too, that you're going to adjust these lines and try different head proportions. I'll try to show you as much variation as I can. One of the things I'm even noticing with this one, I really should have brought the temple lines in further. You'll notice when you reference the Andrew Luis version that those temple lines are brought in further. It's really a distinction of proportion when you widen out the bridge of the nose, but bring in that top ridge of the eye or this area right here, you're basically going to get a different look. We have to be careful of that. And I think that's really where referencing this same series of techniques with photographs is such a big deal because you're going to see so many variations in proportion. I think that broadens your perspective as to where. If you approach this in a very systematic, rigid way, as I mentioned before, I think you'll tend to get copies of characters a little too much. Me personally, I like to play around with these concepts, but keep that in mind that because of that, there will be a little bit of variation to my work and that might occur in yours as well, and that's nothing to worry about. Just keep logging in. Plenty of studies just like that. We have that very simplified version and we could clean it up further, but that's really not entirely the point. I'll clean up some of these for you, for your reference files obviously, but. There's that. Now we have that straight on view. It's again in a simplified manner. It's something that hopefully most of us could process with a few iterations, a few practice runs. We should be able to get this right. This is the foundational knowledge that will allow us to do the other steps. Do this as many times as you need to. Let me do a couple quick ones on an angle just to show you the same concept. And by the way, something you can practice over and over that's going to help you with these lessons. Are these right here? I mentioned them in the other lessons that I've provided. But I'll say it again, just taking the time to do these. It's a great warm up activity. This is probably the hardest part for me, is when it's a downward angle and getting that feeling of that curvature, you could even go across the top like this. Just do a bunch of these at different sizes, different angles. Really try to try to show some range here. It's like that. Okay, so back to this one again, you can find those one third. I will admit a lot of times it just eyeball this, but I've done enough of these. Where that starts to occur in my work. When in doubt, just sketch lightly so that you can see through the work and keep making changes as you go. There we go. Another roughed out version. The other thing is this, when you go to do these, try to log in more and worry less about refinement. Volume is going to be better for you when it comes to practice activities like this versus refinement of that's going to compromise the volume. So just keep that in mind. There we go. So there's a couple to get you started. Hopefully that helps. Now let's go ahead and move on and talk about drawing the face with a little more detail forward facing. 4. Additional Planes of the Head: All right, welcome back. So I'm going to show you how we can take this, refine it a bit more. There's actually a batch start right here. I just noticed it's not necessarily wrong, I guess, but it's not as close to the Andrew Louis method. He actually takes the side plane of the head right here, brings it right down to the brow here. Let's get that in there. That will also help us direct this line up and wider through the top of the head. Something like this. Then we will race back all of this now and here, we won't need this anymore. So it really makes that side plane of the head, this whole area all through here. And then also bring this line down to this line in the cheekbone area like that. I feel like this head could be thinner by comparison. Mine is going to come out a little bit wider. We'll just say that mine is a football player. But essentially, the narrowness of the head, the length of it top to bottom, is basically going to affect the slenderness of this head. If you stretch it out, I could increase the top of the head. I could extend the jaw, and then it's going to look more elongated. Just keep in mind mine's a little bit more squared off. Now we can start adding the mouth. And when we do this similar shape, just flipped back an M like shape for the top lip. Remember to the sides of the mouth will sit on the inside of the iris, just almost centered to the eye, really. But I always put it like right to the inside of the iris if I'm trying to be more exact. But that being said, not everybody's mouth only is this wide. Look at somebody like Cameron Diaz, right? She has a nice big smile, you like shape for the bottom lip. And then that keystone shape again back the other way, and then also one at the bottom. Now another thing I really should have added probably even in the previous step, but I missed the bottom shape right here for the chin. What you'll notice is that in the Elms way of doing it, when he does the original planes, the basic planes of the head, this shape is larger. Then when he moves to the secondary planes, it gets smaller. Again, I feel like that's almost another cue to say, look, this information is a little subjective and you're going to utilize it in different ways. Now, he could have meant that, hey, when we zero in on those first planes, the basic planes of the head, we want to really get big broad strokes, that's obviously what he was implying with the drawing. Then when you get into the secondary, they are naturally going to get smaller. But it wouldn't change the fact that the chin itself would go from a bigger shape to a smaller shape. You can cut into these ideas all sorts of ways, like I think I've already mentioned with the nose, you can revert it down to these big broad shapes, but you can also get very, uh, detailed and angular. And get in there and do all sorts of variations to the angles and the plane changes of the nose itself. Again, you're going to really take from this what you will and develop some of your own ideas. And I think that's fine. The nose just cutting into that bulbous part right there. I think that's something he does in his it looks a bit like I don't know what shape you'd call that. Just I widened square with a tapered top. Looks like it's starting to be a house shape, but not quite that. Then he gets the nostrils in there. A little bit more detailed but again, super simplified. Very basic. You've got the angles right here. And then past that, it's probably just, oh my bad here we've got the V in the lip and then the U like shape, or two lines going down the bottom lip. I feel like the eyes could be a little bit wider. Then again, I will generally go back and check my symmetry. Either with a symmetry tool, if I'm drawing on paper, a light table, or I will, sometimes you can just fold the paper or make a copy of it and flip it over. But essentially just whatever you got to do to check and correct the symmetry. I'm going to do that in the final version that I share with you in the art files. But I'm not going to do it here because again, this is more or less to just teach you the shapes and the principles. The other thing that he adds is two marks from roughly about the width of the nose or the height of the nose, right along what I'm saying, along this line here. He puts these angles in like this. I'm not entirely sure what those are for. I don't see a whole lot of use form in my own work but since we are sticking to the Andrew Lumas method, I wanted to show you that. So just be aware those are in there. Then from the hair line he does the hair shape which comes out to this line back this way, cuts in towards the temple area and then down by the ears and then raise that up. I don't know, I look at it and go, well, is this really necessary? It's a very distinct hairstyle. Right? But I don't think that's the point. The point is to, again, really hit home. That we need to simplify everything into big, broad shapes and strokes, big forms. And therefore, it simplifies these more complex areas of the work. And hair is a perfect example. It's like whenever I struggle to draw hair, I can generally take a step back and go, oh, you know what, I'm not going for the broad strokes first and then slowly edging in all the details. Because obviously you can get very caught up in details with hair almost every time. If you just really simplify it with the big shapes first and then slowly build in those details, it just becomes a lot easier. I would say most things are that way. I don't know if that's exactly why he explains it this way. Or utilizes even plan changes for the hair. But it does make some sense that you're going to get volume and gradient differences even in the hair. Why not break it up into these plan changes? But again, if you look at it in the idea of like when am I going to draw that hairstyle? It becomes very, you know, it seems like maybe a bit of a wait, but it's not really, it's just a concept and something to practice and then use it on all sorts of hairstyles. Right. Okay, so there we go. There's our rough sketch and I think he actually excludes a center line up here on the forehead. We'll get that out of there. Yeah, I think that's about it. Like I said, I'll clean it up for you, but I don't want to bore you with that part of the process and it's not very necessary. As I've already mentioned, I would rather see you draw more versions than worry about cleaning everything up at this stage of the work. Now what we'll do is head over to the next lesson. I want to show you a similar approach for the side view of the head. With that, let's move on. 5. More Front Planes: Welcome back. Now I want to take this one and refine it a bit more with you. I'm going to go and make a copy. I got to back up this one. Let's see. The next stages of the work that you'll see in the Andrew Lomas book are to start to sculpt out more of these areas here, something like this. This helps to get this front portion of the forehead in place right there. So you get the shape of the brow line, that pocket of skin over the eyebrows, and that flat region of the forehead. When this is done with the sorrow head, the shape, if I remember correctly, is something like this. It's much larger. I'm wanting to say it's almost like a Superman logo, but maybe the sides are cut off. It's a very large plane change on that front brow area. Again, areas like this is where it starts to make me think more independently of these ideas. Because again, everybody does it a little bit different or there's lots of variation in various areas, but they all agree that this part relatively flattens out. Again, one that I use is more like this, that I've gotten more from probably comic art than anything. Something like that. And then if we take the, I think he brings these in more of an angle. So if we take the cheek area and, and take some of these angles back, it's basically the same information, but he starts to make it look more organic. I think that's another thing that is special to pay attention to with the stuff, is that if you were to use angles smaller and smaller angles to describe anything, you're going to eventually get something that looks organic. You're going to get enough angles, and small enough succession will look like curves. That's a neat thing to zero in on with. This is that if you just keep chiseling out your, your angles, and again, smaller and smaller iterations, you're going to eventually get that organic feeling that you're looking for. But you're going to do it in a way where essentially you're mapping out the space and you're just doing it in more perspective oriented design way of thinking. For some of us that can help considerably for others not so much. Keep in mind that these things don't help everyone the same. You might try to do this and it might just seem like a foreign language. Right angles are beneficial to some of us and others, not as much. You have to just give it a shot and see what it does for you. Now, we could take parts of this back and say, okay, we've got more definition through the cheekbone area, But you see it started with the initial layout that he already provided us. There's also some symmetry issues here. Mine doesn't look as well proportioned as Andrew Louis version. I did want to take a moment to show you how to just think about correcting things like that as you go. Because for me being a digital artist is easy enough for me to slice it down the middle and flip it. And then generally what I notice with my own art is I have to transform it a little bit. I have to pull it to one side even after I flip it. But I want to show you methods, even if you're working traditionally, you know which means bringing out a ruler. Right? And you'll see artists hold up their pencil with one eye closed. Right? There's all these techniques for trying to gauge inaccuracies to the work. But what I want to do here is I'm going to start with a center line, blue line. This what? Okay. And so hopefully you can see it better and you could already start to see how I'm skewing, but what I would do is I would pick a side of the head, I would just take points like this. And this is just like me measuring off center. Right. I mean, you could do this with an overlay or light table underlay, really would probably be the best bet. Or you could just make light blue light marks in general, but another color makes it easier to discern. But what I'm doing is I'm just mapping off center the amount of distance to the one side. You could pick one side and flip it over to the other. Maybe you felt like the hair line was better on the right side. You could flip it the other way on portions of it. It doesn't all have to be from left to right. I'm going to do that just to keep it a little more simplified for you, but notice each point that I make is basically giving me alignment up and down. It's also given me the width across. I can do this as many times as I need to until it feels a bit confusing. I feel like the ear needs to come down a bit because this is a pretty straight on shot. I'm actually not going to map the ear right there. I'm going to probably redraw that first and then map it. But I'll just estimate it right here. I'm going to make it a little bit above that. Should be good right there. Again, I'm just using this as you would use a ruler. If you were working traditionally, you could do it point by point piece by piece. Another way to do a way to do it when you're doing it traditionally, is you would map the distance over right with your ruler and just put a small.in that you could definitely use erasable colored pencil or something like that. But now we've got plenty of guides here. I need to flip this. In my instance, again, hopefully you get this is the way that you can do it traditionally as well. I'm just flipping it instead of trying to rule every line. Now you see it's given me a set of guides that shows me I'm pretty far off on the one side. So let me soft erase that and correct it. Okay. I added a couple more just to give me that perimeter shape from the hair. So if I go up here and I also noticed that I needed to add a little bit of height to mine, I'm going to do that as well. If I bring that all the way out to this line, you see how much I have to actually pull that line out from where I was quite considerably. I probably should even made one for that mark right there. But I'll just add in the other reference points first. Pretty far off in a lot of these areas. And even my center line shows me now that I was a bit more off than I wanted to be. There's the shape of the eye. Look at that major, major lay off there. And then also, another thing I noticed is that I needed to taper in the jaw line a bit further. I'm also going to correct that, which is going to throw off my mark for the previous stage. But also I have to do is reference that to one side to the other. If I have this amount of distance right there, left over, then if I make the mark over here, I can pay attention to that. Almost like negative space drawing, where I'm looking at the blue lines that are passing over. And then I can nudge those lines over a little bit more, a little bit less. But what I'm trying to do is get a little bit more slope into that jaw line. Oh, look at this right here. So a big difference if we go to this point. I think this is helpful to do because it helps me to realize how much my mind is pulling to one side or my eye, I guess, but my, my mind is pulling from one side to the other. Even right here, I was still managing to skew and I've got this very discernible center line right in front of me. And it's still hard to not skew over again whenever we feel that bit of resistance and we're barreling through it, we're doing something that's allowing us to fix it and move through it. That's when we're learning and growing hopefully anyways, that's where our observations are being reinforced or reconciled or something they're being challenged and that's a tricky thing to do. We can make the same mistakes for a long time before moving past it, I think. And at least with myself, I've had to battle certain things for a long time. This is one of the symmetry is a tough one for me. But I'm not giving up because I absolutely love drawing symmetrically and I find it to be challenging, so I'm going to keep on going. But at least now with techniques like this, you can start to see where you're going off the rails. Hopefully, even this point I feel like it's a little bit off. I'm not going to go back and fix every line. I think that's a bit much. But certain times I feel like you need to not just be lazy, but then at the same time you don't want to fix every single thing because then it looks too mechanical. Yeah, it's a balancing act, like many things are withdrawing. It's like how much do I fix and how just do the thing and stay creative and stay moving in a forward momentum without too much critical rethinking of every single action. Yeah, it's a tricky one to figure out now with the hair line here, this is the inside hair line. Then we still have to add the dimension, the depth here. Something like that. And again, I mentioned, I'm going to bring the ear down like this, so let me fix that. Now, again, this point here to the divide of the hair there. It's a lots of correcting here, but I think it should look a lot better. And then we can move on to cleaning it up a little bit more. Okay. Now let's check without the guides, see what we got. Yeah, I feel like that's looking a lot better. Now, I'm going to stop here because we're running short on time in this lesson. But what I want to do is move over to the next lesson. I'll finish cleaning up a little bit as I go here, there's still some wobbly lines and some bad marks. But I want to show you now how to cut into the eyes and refine this even further. With that, let's move on to our next lesson. 6. Refinement of the Front View: And welcome back. Now we will take this and develop the eyes. This is initially what made me realize that this was pretty far off is that when you go to put the eyes in, I had started drawing them because I draw a lot of the stuff before I start the lesson. And when you go to draw the eyes in, they line up pretty much the base of it, lines up pretty much to this point here, but a little bit up from there. It doesn't sit right on that bottom line. But it's also not probably dead center, I guess. It feels like it's a little bit centered here, But I usually leave a little bit more space up top. It's hard to discern in the Andrew Limas book because he changes this line to something like this. And we'll do that here in a minute. But what I want to explain is that you always have the side of the nose to give you the inside of the eye, right? The side of the mouth should be roughly the center of the eye. Just so you don't. When I say the center of the eye and I say roughly, it's because if you look at the eye like this, you have the iris right in the pupil. The mouth is usually right here. If you go all the way down, it's usually right about there. It's not dead center. But then I think I've already mentioned there's so many variations to that, right? Some people just have really big smiles. These are guides, they're not rules. But this will help you place the eye right about there. But the other thing is this, you see, I've got almost a little too much distance to the eye face, it's not as bad. Now, I tried to correct it a bit as I was going here. Really could even bring this in a little bit more. We have to remember if we bring it in, we got to bring it in on both sides. And I wanted that taper and that sloping down to the jaw line like this, which I think that's a bit better than it was. But again, when you go to place the eye, make sure that you have five eyes across, you're going to get one spacing here. The spacing of the eye. Spacing between the eyes, another eye and the other side of the face. That's 12345 across. Right again, it's the eyes across, It's the width of the nose and it's the placement of the mouth should help you to get the, the general placement of the features pretty accurately placed. But it's still pretty tricky. It's because there's so many other proportions to the head, The slope and the scale, or I should say the slope of the head itself will make it odd. If the head just too widely drawn, too boxy. Any of these things, even though you're getting all those other things right, it can still look odd. I think that's where I've seen artists even question on the less and say, how does myself look? And I'll look at the art and it looks pretty good overall for proportions. But then something will be misaligned, or vice versa. Everything will have this great alignment, but the proportions will be off. It's just a tricky thing. There's a lot going on here and that's where we have to just keep on, keep it on, and do lots and lots of volume. The other thing he starts to define in his version is there's more of that angle to the eyebrows. It's already there with the other lines. But it's good to get that in more distinctly that we do have this noticeable angle to the brow line. It does pretty much coincide with the side plane of the head. The eyebrow here is at points, misaligned it here, but it pretty much lines up to the side plane of the head, at least in his illustration of it. We'll do something like that then. For the eyes, as I mentioned. It also gets rid of this really harsh straight line, which makes sense. It doesn't look very organic. He just brings in a couple of lines this way. And he also gets the brow line in which I feel like maybe I didn't leave enough space. Try to observe this under the top eyelid, I should say the top eyelid right about here. I have to squeeze that in. So I think that maybe my proportions and alignments off there bit. And then a couple angles under the eyebrow there. He also cuts to the ears a bit. Again, I'll continue to clean this up for you, but as I mentioned, that's not entirely the point. It's mainly getting you to see these different shapes and to think about them and hopefully by seeing me draw through it with you, it gives you just somebody else's perspective on it so that you can work through it and gain some ideas on your own. But yeah, it's again, I got to say multiple times wrote these lessons that I really don't think it's about drawing it exactly the way these other artists do. Because if that was the case, there wouldn't be so many variations out there. Then look up planes of the head on Pentraest you'll see all sorts of variations. There's three D sculpted variations, there's different artistic variations. There's even people that are redrawing these particular ones. The popular ones, the Asaro head, the Andrew Loomis head. Then they're doing in a way where I would say some of the decisions are better. They're different but better. I just don't like to take that off the table. If you're more new to it, just remember to back it down and simplify more. Even this right here is a little bit more complex than I would typically use for any head drawings that I do. It's still a great study to do and hone your skills, but yeah, there's just a lot here for most of my drawings are a little more simplified I guess, but every time I do this I feel like I'm learning. I feel like I'm getting a better idea of the structure of the head and allows me to feel more confident about drawing it. Let's go ahead and stop here, and we will continue on to the next lesson. With that, let's move on. 7. Planes of the Head Side View: And welcome back. So now I want to talk to you about drawing the planes of the head from the side view. So what I want to do is show you first how to draw the side view that is similar to the one we already did, that's similar to the Andrew Lumis method. So the more basic planes of the head. And then I'll show you how I start to deviate here and do another version that has more planes, more transitional areas. But again, I'll start to veer off the Andrew Lumis method and show you some of the distinctions that I tend to gravitate towards With that, let's jump in. What I've done here is I've drawn a perfectly squared off box. You could count the smaller squares in the grid and see that what I have here, 102-468-1010, if we went five down, obviously we're at the halfway point. The other way you can do this is just to, as I've mentioned, criss cross your corners. And that will give you center, this would be a good opportunity to check it. And it falls right there where it needs to. The center line is a really good point to measure because it's going to give us placement of the eyes. It's going to also help us locate relatively the ear. What I'm going to do is start with a circle. Put that to the back. The back of the head and the top of the head are going to hit that area. I guess I could have drew it right to that spot. The nose will extend and reach this left line. We'll start with our similar approach where we slice off the sides, find center there. That's our brow line. It's about right. It should be higher than the eye. Obviously, the ear will go back here. The bottom of this gives us our base of the nose, then this will give us the base of the chin. We're going to work actually back here, because we've got to leave room for the nose. I'm going to start with a more primitive version. We'll get the jaw line in there, work back to the top of the head. Remember the top one third gives us the approximate hair line. Another thing that varies quite greatly from person to person. Something else. You're going to always adjust these things. I always feel the need to stop and explain this further. And I think about this a lot myself when I'm doing my studies, it's pretty hard to say. This is going to encapsulate all the different people you're going to draw. One of the things that I notice when you study from photos is you'll see a big difference in the one third, especially right here. You see it here, you see it everywhere. But for some reason we see it more distinctly in the middle where the brow line to the nose can be quite different. You get people with larger noses, slender faces. Again, I just always feel I need to point that out. The one third is a nice general way to get a sense of understanding first. And then over time, like I said, you're going to really play around with moving these things around a bit more. I think that one reason it's easy to stay to it, more often than not is when you look at skulls, they typically look quite similar. But there are variations in there as well. But then more variations come with the facial anatomy. Obviously, we're going to get the plane change at the bottom of the draw line here. I think this is an important one to pay attention to. We're going to grab the center line. We're going to go down to the chin here. Another important distinction. So just remember this, I'll see this referred to by different artists higher and lower in different renditions anywhere in here. But you're basically pulling from that zygomatic bone. But again, I typically see a lot of variation right there. Now we've got the brow, we'll bring it back this way. Remember that indentation points to the eye, right? We'll bring that back down. Back out for the nose. I'm trying to keep it pretty angular just to get these simple ideas in place. Another good relationship to pay attention to is a slope like this, from the nose down to the chin. Usually the top lip not always sticks out just a little bit more, sometimes more noticeably if they have pretty significant underbite. And then some people have an underbite. Did I say underbite twice? Hopefully I didn't. If they got a more significant overbite and then it doesn't show the lower jaw sticks out if they have an underbite. Right. So there's the basic angles that you'd see from the profile. That bottom lip should really be pointing up. That top lip should be angled and pointing down like this. Pretty obvious there. Something like that. So now we can take this and say, okay, for the ridge of the eyebrow. If you were to think more like the Andrew Luis method, it probably looks something like this. Then you get the side plane of the nose. I'm not going to draw the front plane of the nose because it would pretty much be hard to see from this angle. You might get a little bit of it if I zoom even a little bit tighter. Show you what I mean here. You might see just a little bit of a transition there, but from this angle you're going to see that side plane of the nose very well. Maybe the bottom planes of the nose like this. I'll start getting rid of some of these construction lines. This is back to here. I remember we've got that angle here. This comes down to the side of the mouth. Realistically, if this exactly as a Luis method would describe, you'd get that other plane change across the base of the chin and this would come down and connect to there. I've got it going probably too far back on the chin. Again, I do feel like some of this is subjective because I've seen it done many, many different ways. Hopefully the main thing that you get from these lessons is the way to search, studying plane changes on your own. And developing your own understanding that you commit to your way of doing things, your skill set. Now one that I think is probably the most important and everyone agrees on this one is just this big major plane change here. I don't know, every different type of head study I've seen, they all pretty much agree upon that. If you look at this eye cavity right here, you wouldn't see it as eyes, right? You'd see it as an entire eye cavity. It does slope back and go across to the cheekbone like this. When it comes down here. I would say that I probably see this area a little different. I'm just going to show you that. I would say it does more like this. Let's just, personally, I would see the shapes a little bit more like that, a little more chiseled, a few more angles like this, little shifts here and there, nothing major. But again, you can start with a more basic interpretation of it first, get comfortable with that, and then you could slowly start to notice things, right? That's what we do, we do what we can do, and then we observe and then we re calibrate in a sense, we're, it's why you can be drawing something in a certain way for years sometimes and then all of a sudden you're like, wait a second, I see that differently. Now it's like your whole paradium on a certain topic can get shifted and all of a sudden you're drawing it in a new way. Then then you wonder, why did I always draw this previous way? I can't believe I didn't see this glaring idea. It's weird, but yeah, it just shifts the way that we perceive that given thing. It's neat though, just like that. We've got some major planes now, Other ones that if I had to keep going with this and develop it further, other ones I'm going to pick apart would be like the cheekbone coming this way. I like drawing this little shape for the masseter. I guess that's a bit distracting, but there is a definition there, especially with a very chiseled jaw line. You could get in here and say, well, there's this muscle here. This starts to feel a bit more like anatomy, so I'm going to do that. But the cheekbone, I definitely feel like I would want to bring out some of the plane changes here because they're pretty noticeable on almost anybody, but really noticeable on other people, on some people. There's also sometimes a notable definition here, it's not so flat, it usually comes out a little bit here. I get that in there. Then maybe I'll take this and bring it over to the side and just do a little bit more cuts into it to show you how I would think about it. Let me do that. I'll say that we have this more basic version where we just go for the broad strokes, secondary planes, basically something like this. There's some major planes. Then the way that I would take that a bit further, the way that I would add to this, probably bring out this definition in that cheek bone, you could even play around with shapes of the ears or ear. In this case, you could make the argument that there would be a pretty defined plane change here. You'll see these lines. Andrew Loomis has this in his book as well. Where he shows the distinction of top surface of the head, secondary surface back here, and then away from the light down here. Stuff like that. Then for the eye cavity would really cut into this a lot more. Let me do that real quick. The eyes at the halfway point, it doesn't have to be exact, but around that area, I would pull out some of the angles across this way. Maybe even some of the top of the cheek bone, da, da, and about something like that. Again, you could take this even further, but that's probably enough for what I would see as the most needed. I guess one more. Maybe this right here. I tend to draw this in my work. I'd probably get that in there as well. And then I'd probably get rid of this line now like this, and this now becomes a distraction. And then I would carry back up this way, get some of that top of that zygomatic bone. I think I would move this line back this way. I almost try to get this feeling that the areas, these planes are rotating around this, this indentation of the eye socket. I think that's about it. But again, as I've mentioned over and over, you can really just keep taking this further and further. It's hard when you get into developing these ideas to know when to stop again. Less is more. A lot of times until you absolutely need it, which I always tend to notice, people that utilize this more are doing more advanced portraitures and things like that. More advanced portrait work. Hopefully, that explains this. With that, let's go and stop here, and head over to our next lesson. 8. Upward Angle View: Welcome back. Now what we'll do is go and draw a upward shot and a downward shot of the head using a little bit more of the primitive major planes that we've learned. I think that again, this is good for you to try to log in lots of volume and then slowly add more additional planes as you need them and as you feel comfortable with them. I'm going to start with a box like prism. It just helps me to have another reference point. I could draw this nice and light. You could even take the time to draw this in a correct perspective. But I actually prefer the speed we're going be the speed of drawing it. More simplified like this, without all the guides. And since we're going to be making so many changes on the fly anyways, I feel like this, this is a good way to go. Now keep in mind it may take you a little bit more practice to get comfortable with drawing even these box like prisms where they feel like they're in a correct three dimensional space. But that's a good thing to practice. If not, you can always go right to the next step, which is obviously the circle and slicing off the sides. The reason why I'd like to show you this as well is that the side slice is a direct, direct correlation to the box. Essentially, that's what you're implying. It's just another way to go about it. You see that, that little plus sign there, cross section is aligning with both this line here and this line here. I would say vertical and horizontal, but they're diagonal. It's tilted back, but it's parallel to the, these lines. Likewise, if we go across the face, we can really make the distinction in the association to this line up here. It just gives us that idea of perspective rather quickly. A lot of times I will do the curve to find the one third. I think I've already mentioned that a couple of times, but I'll just keep reiterating. But once I get to that point where I think I've defined my one third in this case, here to here is the first here to here is the second, here to here is the third. And I'm just going to extend a little bit further. We also have to think about that idea, perspective, right? That it's going to get a little bit wider as it comes towards the viewer, towards camera, things like that. I think that's why this particular way of drawing the head is so well, this method is very beneficial to it. But drawing the head in this angle is pretty darn hard. I've done a lot and I still can battle it. But hopefully these techniques give you a sense of comfort and allow you to see that there are a lot of methodical ways to go about it. And each one of them reinforce other aspects as I'll show you. Essentially we've got our one third. Now remember we're going to want a nice straight line. Say we were exaggerating this box further. Say we had our initial prism was like this. We wanted to apply that really exaggerated perspective to the face, because there's going to be instances where you might want to do that, right? Well then each time you introduce this line, they need to feel parallel to one another, but they also need to go with the perspective. I think that's pretty obvious, but I just want to point that out. This one's pretty easy. This line will go right about here. Right about here. There's a little bit of widening, but not a tremendous amount. There's our one third of the face, obviously it's very flat at this point, the ear is going to be back here in that lower quadrant. The jaw line will come down and then forward. Now keep in mind the more you rotate this head back, at a certain point, instead of drawing the jaw line up, you'll actually draw down and back. That's a pretty extreme version, but you'll get there as you rotate the head back. This would be way back here. It's just something to be ready for. But it's almost like a real difficult thing to draw because our force of habit makes us always want to draw the jaw line down. Because 99% of the time, that's what the characters were drawing are oriented at. It's very rare that you start to draw the head that far back looking up. Unless you're doing that scene where you're looking up at the hero flying into the scene. Then it's going to be a little more common where somebody gets knocked back onto the ground, chins up. Then you're going to have more chin than face there, right? But essentially we've got this and then we can take this center line, bring this out. Now remember the zygomatic bone is a little more like this, but we typically bring this out at an angle, down to the side of the chin for this overly simplified version. We also want to start thinking about, I call it the temporal ridge. I don't know if that's accurate terminology, so you don't quote me on that, but sounds about right. We get that next little temple area. This particular area too is pretty tricky to get right as well. I play around with this line, at this perspective, I play around with all the lines. I move them around constantly and try to get the best out of it. Again, these are guides. And then you're going to need a certain amount of just creative thinking and observation and being open minded and adjusting things because it is one of those trickier angles. As we get the Andrew Loomis method sunglasses, we get those in place like this, we find that temporal line, we'll bring that back. We bring this line across. Now remember this top line was the brow line. This bottom line is about where we place the eyes. Now if you're looking at the face straight on the eyes, don't sit right on this line. But now that we're looking up at the head, they're definitely going to sit a lot closer or directly on it. Remember, this is the nose area. There might be a little bit too much space for the mouth area, but I don't think so. Because what happens is, again, after we place these eyes, which I'll go ahead and do now, we get this area right there between the eyes, the keystone shape, Bring this way out. Now something to pay attention to here is that the nose can get very shallow from top to bottom from an angle like this. Be ready, study your photos. Try different variations. Here you'll be amazed. Especially the further the head tilts back, the more shallow the nose will get. It will start to encroach upon the eye and the side of the cheek. We got to figure too. If they have a more extreme angle to their nose, then that's going to occur as well. Something to really zero in on when you study from photos and you try this technique from various photos, which is super helpful technique. If not, we probably draw too many carbon copy faces. I'm trying to chisel out some of these angles here, right about there. Get the angle for the brow, how it's dropping back into the eye cavity a little bit. The angle of the cheekbone Now, the more the head rotates back, the angle of the cheek bone and the nose will start to align more as well. That's something else to pay attention to. We have to remember that the mouth jets out from the face as well. And also that we have to compress past our center line, the other side of the lip, the furthest away from us has to get compressed the bit. We're going to have a wider version on this side that lines up to approximately the inner side of the thrius or pupil, I should say, right about the middle. Then this side, all this information over here has to be compressed R, We have to keep an eye on that. The bottom lip, I find it. It's good to hurry up and get the, the lower portion in that lower keystone shape because since we are looking up at the face again, we're going to see less that bottom lip. It's almost better to focus on this plane change than the bottom lip itself. At least that's the way I see it. That might just be personal preference. Same thing with the chin. Get that bottom plane change of the chin in there. Again, hopefully we're getting this effect. It might be a little too extreme here, where we're getting a widening of the jaw line and chin area. And a narrowing as we go up. That coincides with our basic prism that we started with. Now the other thing that you start seeing here is this bottom ridge of the neck, bottom plane of the lower jaw, bottom of the jaw, neck area. This transitional area here. This one's pretty tricky. What I will say about this is that the neck is really a lot of diamond like shapes, triangles and diamonds really triangles. Pay attention to that as you simplify it with these plane changes in V's too. You'll see the sternocleidomasteroids as they come down. Lots of V's in the neck muscles though we're not zone in on the actual muscular anatomy as much right here. But something to just keep in mind, you know, it all ties together because there's, you're thinking of the one thing, maybe you're drawing the other aspect of it, but you're still kind of thinking about these other concepts. Again, they all in, in your ability to draw this stuff even though it doesn't directly pertain. It's just like when you think about the skull, even though you're drawing the anatomy, the superficial anatomy, you're thinking about the skull as you draw, just like we thought about the zygomatic bone, when we place that plane up to the ear. Now with the eyes, keep them very simple. I think a good suggestion for eyes anytime, but definitely at an angle like this is just to do one side then the other. Really just draw the tops at an angle like this. You could even, well obviously you can omit the bottom because it sits on that bottom plane change. But still it's just a good idea to simplify the eyes by just drawing either the tops or bottoms and playing around that concept, it really does help. That's about it. I mean, we could get in here and we could define a lot more plane changes, but I want to keep this relatively simplified for you so that you can again, log in more of these and start tilting the head in different orientations. Let's go and stop here and head over to our next lesson. 9. Downward Angle View: Welcome back. Now we'll do the downward view, the same approach. It'll be a little bit redundant, but then again, it's somewhat quite different because all these forms and volumes just look different from different angles. And that's where we have to really take the time to do all sorts of variations here. And you can let me know if you need to see more variations, but hopefully these primary ones give you a nice variety to consider. We'll draw the basic prism. Again, put our sphere inside, slice off the sides, and find our center lines. Remember that these lines are parallel to the vertical and horizontal lines of the prism. And we'll now find our one thirds. This part, to me is a little bit subjective, as I think I've mentioned before, because it's hard to discern if these are perfect one third perspective. But we have to make a decision and then we have to keep an open mind for changes as needed. So I'd like to keep this line straight down the middle as I did with the Up few similar concept. Now I do want to mention there is a way to divide up the box in perspective and find your equal one third. I was almost taught it and I started to, but then I thought, you know what, it's going to make it just far too messy. It's not in Andrew Lemmas book. I don't see any of them really pointed out, but you can do that. It's a perspective trick. There's videos out there that you can look up. Just look, dividing a box into equal one third. You'll find it pretty simple to do. But what happens is we get a lot of construction lines all over the place. I already feel like this is a lot for what we have in front of us now. I didn't want to confuse you too much. Hopefully, that's not something that you would have preferred to see. But again, I think a certain amount of this we have to get good at gauging what we're looking at and make those distinctions. That's why I want to teach you these methods for drawing the planes of the head. But as I've said, and I'll say again, you really do need to reference this against various photos that intrigue you. If you see a really cool perspective to a face, you can just draw by observation, which you've probably already been doing, I imagine if you're here. But then also take the time to break that photo down into the prisms, these planes. You'll be amazed at what you see because you'll see all the differences in the variation from the way the noses look at certain angles, the proportions of them. But in a plan or method, and a angle based method. And it just gives you another perspective on the face that we don't get when we just draw all the curves, all the organic, superficial anatomy. In fact, I think a lot of times that stuff can confuse us until we take the time to do this. It's a mixed bag. I know that I've spent most of my time drawing organically. It's not like I can say that this has revolutionized my art yet, but what it's done is it's really opened my eyes to things I wasn't previously seeing. I'm excited to do a lot more of these and that's ultimately why I was excited to share these lessons with you. You see a lot of my lines here are a bit off and crooked. There's other steps you can take, obviously, to draw out these parallel lines. And then digitally, you can copy and paste them up the face. So start with the brow line, draw a horizontal line or line going across the brow line. Then just copy and paste it all the way down to each of the major facial features that you need to align to. And that's really a better way to do it. You'll probably see a few skewed areas since I'm not doing that. Generally, I pay the price by drawing freehand. But again, it's that same concept of when you are drawing freehand, you are training a different part of your mind to be accountable for that. There's a time in a place, there's times I rule every line that I can, and I take more structure. And there's a time that I try to draw more organically and freehand, but generally, like I said, I pay the price there most of the time. Now also I want to point out that I drew those circles in for the eye sockets. I was really trying to show you how you have to think of the eyes spherically and pushed into that eye socket. If you don't, you tend to draw the eyes really pasted on the front of the face. That's another reason why taking the time to learn the planes of the head, super important. The brow area specifically is super, super important for these angles. Because as more novice artists, we will draw the eyes stuck right to the front face. And we do not put them back in that recess cavity like they need to be. That's just a little trick that I do that I picked up from various artists where I like to draw those circles in and really try to push them under that brow ridge and get that feeling that there is a cavity there, there's a pocket of depth. Then when I go to draw the eyes, they generally Retain a little bit of that feeling. So something that I find to be super helpful, just really trying to get the feeling that the nose is coming out away from the face and angling back to the flat portion of the face, getting in the angles for the eyebrows. A lot of this is pretty much just refinement. Now. I'm just really going over what's already there. I'm not going to make a whole lot of additional changes. I do end up changing the height of the head. As I look at that more and more, it just started to look too tall. But obviously proportions vary greatly. I think that as we do more of these studies, we might, I think the initial goal is to get a standardized head and get good at that. But then the other goal should be when we do explore various proportions and various character types, having a consistency throughout that, a continuity in the storytelling and panel work that we're doing. I think that's really, again, where this approach really shines. Because the angles and the development of the planes allow you to have a better sense and control of even proportions. Again, hopefully that helps with your continuity of drawing different characters from different angles, but also being aware of their proportional differences. All right, I'm going to go in time, lapse this part a little bit just because it's basically redundant. And all I'm doing here is sculpting the work and making some small changes at this point. Which I tend to do because I'm just too darn critical at times. But that is a necessary part of the work, right? Try to get the best out of it. We've made the big sweeping passes and now just trying to bring some things in. I do get the question of like how do I know how to gauge and fix proportional issues or neighboring anatomy. So I think this was more in the entirety of the body, but I think it applies to big and small. I always gauge the size of something. When I'm in a perspective and a foreshortened perspective, I gauge the size of something by the most neighboring thing. For instance, if I'm trying to judge the eyes, I'm looking at the scale of the forehead, the slope of the forehead, and that slope of that forehead gives me a reference point for the eyes. Also the cheek bones. The cheek bones down to the mouth and on and on. It's getting good at spatial relationships, size relationships between your studies. But again, that all comes from, like I've mentioned a bunch of times in these lessons, studying from photos in life, and you really just can't get around that. It's a lot of paying attention to everything around you and drawing it in one way or another, whether it be quick sketches or more rendered versions. But obviously, like I mentioned, quick sketches is going to give you the volume that you need, that's just part of the game. We have to do that daily. Hopefully these lessons have been informative for you. I'd love to know what you think, as well as what else you'd like to see. Let me know if you have any questions, and I really appreciate you watching the content. Good luck with the art and bye for now.