JW Learning

Beginner Figure Drawing  - Drawing The Head - Intermediate Structures

Hello once again! Again, appreciate your patience. So, I'll follow up with what I mentioned in the Proportions class, focus primarily on the foundational shapes and forms for the head. The head is unique because of all those complex facial features which are hard to ignore, so your best bet is to focus on the skull, mask and nose as the forms to work on.  Eyes, mouth and ears you can leave as simple landmark lines as you practice.   Now, you're actually again on the right path here, especially the additional 3/4 sketch your posted. The big difference compared to your figure sketch heads is that corner landmark that you've added in where the temple is. So, you've made progress already with getting the head facing the right direction simply by applying that corner landmark. So, good work there keep that going. Your little cartoonish/manga sketch also looks quite good also, so you've stepped up already.  Now, as for the front of face, this is actually the most difficult position to draw the head, so you're not alone here.  Noses in particular tends to give a lot of people trouble front-on, myself included.  With the nose, you always want to think of it as a box-like structure that is leaning away from the viewer.  With these type of tricky parts, ask yourself what simple form does this look like, and what positioning is it in.  Do this for all body parts. A useful equation you can use is: A body part = shape/form simplification + its positioning in 3D space.  You want to watch out also for the proportional spacing between the eyes. In your second page your eyes just are a little too large which is throwing things off.   The face is approximately 5 eye lengths in width, so the eyes usually slot into places 2 and 4.  You can message around with those proportions in comics and manga, but at first you want to get real proportion looking right.  The jawline is also a little too rounded. You can get away with the more rounded/pill shape for the top of the head, but for the jaw you want a little more more of a sharper corner here, and a slightly straight line all the way to the chin.   It's a little bit better in the second sketch.  The chin also you have to think of as its own shape, something like a box or rounded box as it protrude outwards, but think of that asa a secondary form to lay on top.  The actual  facial features I would recommend doing the class that's been made specifically for those areas. So, overall, another nice start.  I'll cover your Positioning project tomorrow as I have a few other people to give feedback to.  In the mean time keep this up! Let me know if you have any questions for this class! :)

Hi again Nicole, I won't be able to get to your projects until Monday to do a full review unfortunately. Really quick tip which I will elaborate on then, the facial features are something we want to worry about later on. I'll explain in more details then. Appreciate you patience. :)

as the title says. really struggling on the front face for some reason, can't seem to get it down. 
Top right is an attempt of a 3/4 face, guy is just someone off a video I happened to be watching. Got some feedback from an artist friend on it, so it currently looks better than it was before haha.<img srcset="https://static.skillshare.com/uploads/project/c896f758fa5bf37e0400c624fc274857/17f32cd5.png 600w, https://static.skillshare.com/uploads/project/c896f758fa5bf37e0400c624fc274857/17f32cd5.png 1000w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600px, 100vw" src="https://static.skillshare.com/uploads/project/c896f758fa5bf37e0400c624fc274857/17f32cd5.png" loading="lazy" alt="Drawing the head - image 1 - student project">
i think i'm really struggling with the facial details (eyes, mouth, nose), the shapes and placements are always weird. any tips?

Drawing the head

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