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How to Draw the Head / Face / Portrait with Steve Huston PART 1 (3 HOURS!)

Feb 27, 2020
Hi, I'm Steve Huston and today I'm excited to be able to offer you a free

head

draw

ing lesson. More than three

hours

of content. This is

part

of a much larger series, over 15

hours

of content. You can find the entire series at www.NewMastersAcademy.org. I hope you check it out. But for now, let's get to it and try to

draw

the

head

with a basic construction and good confidence. This is my basic main structure class. I'm going to show you the basic drawing structure of the head. All the main planes, the main shapes, how the features are laid out in terms of construction lines.
how to draw the head face portrait with steve huston part 1 3 hours
We will write down that basic information. We'll do some assignments where you'll draw a little with those ideas. I'll draw a little with those ideas. We will look at the old masters and see how they did it. And then we'll put it all together at the end and hopefully have a good basic understanding of the head by the end of the class. So I hope you'll join me. Well, now that we start with the head, I think of the head as the first gesture of the body. Let's talk about gesture and structure here. The head is the first gesture.
how to draw the head face portrait with steve huston part 1 3 hours

More Interesting Facts About,

how to draw the head face portrait with steve huston part 1 3 hours...

As we look at the art, when you look at me, you'll look here first and then move down. So if this is a book, chapter number one here. We have to do this right and that's where everything comes from. In fact, we can use the head as a yardstick to measure the rest of the body and make sure it follows. So we want to get that head working and we're going to take it out of the anatomy here. We have two main anatomical elements. We have the skull, the completely round shape of the skull. And then we have the

face

mask that contains the features.
how to draw the head face portrait with steve huston part 1 3 hours
Those two forms have to work together, and then we flow from that. All of the details we're going to talk about will work on these big structures, so we'll start with these big structures. Let me put this here and we'll get going. Let's talk about proportions first. If you look at the shape of the skull, it will be egg-shaped. Now, as we go through different characters, we'll save it for a different chapter, but as we go through characters we'll find that the shape of the egg can change in proportion. It may be a little more spherical.
how to draw the head face portrait with steve huston part 1 3 hours
It may be a little longer. Here we are just going to make a basic egg shape. It could be this. It could be this. Anywhere there. That will be the skull of a profile like that. It will be crucial to get that egg right. I'll show you why in a moment, because it will give us a good connection to our next problem. Let's draw that egg. Now, if we were to view it from the front or back view of that egg, just like looking at a breakfast egg, the end would be spherical in shape and would be masked behind the features.
I'll show you in a moment. Or it will be the skull that we see, and we will also see it momentarily. Egg shape, that's our first shape. The shape of the feature mask, feature mask. Now we can make all kinds of shapes. Let's do a different shape here for a second. I'm going to make an egg and I'm going to make another egg. Now, the advantage of making another egg is that it gives us a kind of roundness, and everything in the body has a certain softness, roundness. Maybe you can draw a little boy who has a very round shape.
That's why it can be seductive to choose that egg shape. The problem is that if we draw shapes that are too curvy, too rounded, they begin to get out of control. We started having problems getting his position. So if we can feel, notice that we come back here now, we made the egg nice and round because that was characteristic of what we saw. We made the

face

shape, I made the face shape a little square, a little more square. By making that second shape, the shape of the mask has a different character than the first, it distinguishes them, and we also notice that we have an idea of ​​where one ends and the other begins.
Then we can get an idea of ​​where the face shape separates from the skull shape. This will allow you to establish the position more easily. We'll get a quicker read on what that position is like. Now we know immediately that we are looking slightly down with that head. Whereas here sometimes it can be a little out of control. What happens if we have a character with a very full nose and a sunken chin? We're not sure if that would be right or correct. It can take us down. But if we're a little square, a little flatter curve here, a rounded curve here, it gives us a good sense of positioning, and that's what we want.
Note that we can shortcut this. I can also take this and stylize it and simplify it and group the two shapes, skull and mask, into one larger shape, the shape of a sailboat. The advantage of this is that it is much faster and easier. The downside is that we then have some work to do to get it back into the true skull shape. But very often we have a hairstyle, let's say a woman with a ponytail bun covering it. So we have options there. We can make it a little simpler. We can make it a little more sophisticated.
We can keep it a little more open. We can keep it much more complete. You can choose the one you prefer. However, what I want is something that is simple enough for me that I can make it quickly and effectively, make it work to build, add other shapes to it, or make it simple but distinctive. so not only does it come down quickly and easily: nothing is easy in art, especially with the head. But it is characteristic of what I see before me, the character I want to draw, what I want to take in a simple and refined way.
If it's still characteristic of what I see, refinement, in this case, shaving a callus or adding some lumps and bumps, that sort of thing, as we'll learn to do in a minute. That is easier. So whatever I choose in my construction I want to make sure it's simple, simple enough that I can decipher it easily, characteristic of what I see, so that it reads well as a head looking down like a woman with a certain hairstyle and feature so I can refine it and turn it into an advanced render if I want. In other words, I'm going to think like a sculptor.
I'm going to start with something simple and then refine it. I will add to it, take away from it, build on it, and finish it. That is the structural idea. If you have or plan to go to any of my basic drawing classes, you will find that I have two ideas, structure and gesture. The gesture is actually two gestures towards the head. There is the gesture of the skull turning back. Let me change the color so you can see it. Gesture of the skull going backwards and gesture of the face going down. If we draw it again, you can see it drawing that simple sailboat shape.
It's one of the reasons I like it for quick sketches. It's characteristic, it's simple. But it still shows not only a characteristic shape that is useful, but also a characteristic of the two skull gestures going back. One of the big mistakes people make is that they have the face mask pretty well established however they chose to do it, but then they draw the skull this way. They will give it little importance. It will be the wrong proportion. There's not enough to fit around the neck, for example. Look how thin the neck becomes when you position the skull wrong.
But we did not recover that trend either. We get a wavy curve on the face. We don't feel that feature returning from the face to the skull. It's starting to look a little strange. Often a hairstyle can fill out in some way and hide that back movement, but we still want to feel it. The other thing we want here, and notice I could make this a lot more square. Make a lot more square decisions instead of round ones so we have a continuity of options there. Notice what happens when I push that skull back with or without styling, and I'm really aware of that movement back to the skull instead of that movement down to the face.
So I'm going to respect the fact that the skull hits the top of our construction. That will give me a much better fit, and we'll look at this idea of ​​connecting and fitting with the next thing, the neck, in more detail. Notice that we came out of the throat. We came out of the back of the head. We added a little bit of shoulder line so you can get an idea of ​​where we would go with that. Notice how high the skull and neck connect. They connect very loudly. In fact, they connect; Let's do it so you can see what we're looking for and visualize it more clearly.
Note that the head and neck (skull and neck) meet approximately at the eye line. In other words, if I do it, I will always be my best role model. If I feel where the skull bone meets the flesh of the neck, look where that is. If I throw that skull and I make it incorrect, I make it too ball-like, a little ball that looks like an alien, or a really big ball like this, watch what happens here. The collar is too low. If you have a really heroic guy, a Superman character, you can get away with the bull neck because the flesh fills up and takes us to that higher level or at least close to that higher level there, and we can escape. with that.
Actually, in the books, the very good books by Andrew Loomis, he uses a stylization. But he's doing these heroic fashion models, a sort of model meets Superman character, so he can get away with it because he's doing this heroic type. But if you do it with an average person, the connection is quite different. Alright, again from the profile we keep that egg shape up. That gives us the feeling that the movement is going backwards. We build the upside down. Notice I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. All those options. Simple but characteristic.
As long as it is that, choose the one you want or many others. So the gesture goes back and the gesture goes down. This is the one that really counts. If you make a mistake, we will have the problems I suggested. The reason I say this really counts is that this is the gesture that will then flow into the rest of the body as we go down. So it's from the face to the neck. From the neck to the torso. From the torso to the hips, the legs, all that good stuff. So we want to make sure we're thinking about this move down.
Now, let's look at the proportions here. If you were to take this entire structure, you would notice that it is the mask of the face without the features, without the protruding nose, without the sunken eye sockets. It's the skull without the hairstyle. But if you were to take that basic construction, you would notice that it creates a square that is a little longer at the face and a little shorter at the skull. Okay, so it's not a perfect square. Let's say this would be a perfect square. It's a little more. If you're going to shit a little more, and what it does is simply give a heroic chin.
Even if you are making a woman, it feels attractive. If it drags on too long, which it can, then it's a problem. Just a little more descent. Then notice that once you add hairstyle and features, nose out, slick back, that can be reversed, of course. But that gives you an idea of ​​the construction. Let's take this further. If we cut all this in half, there will be equal

part

s here or there more or less. Again, if I'm going to be wrong, a little bit more chin is always kind of the default ideal, at least in Western art, in heroic art.
But if we get to that midpoint, we cut it in half, that's basically the eye line. Let me put a little bit of the eyebrow there so you can see it. Notice the eye line where the upper eyelid meets the lower eyelid. That's a middle ground. Again, that's where the neck is, the neck meets the skull somewhere in there. If you ended up down here or up here, anywhere within that range, you're still fine. Chances are the hairstyle will cover it up anyway. Or if it's a guy with short hair, you know, the padding of that chunkier, relatively chunkier neck will take care of that.
Without the hair from the skull to the chin, cut it in half, you have the eye line. From the eye line to the chin, cut it in half and you will have the nose. It may be a little shorter, a little longer, but that's more or less the nose. When you say the nose, it's not the tip of the nose, but where the root of the nose meets the shape of the mouth. Cut it again in half, the edge of the lower lip on average. Again, if I have too much chin, it's better than a little bit of upper lip here, smooth upper lip and two small chins.
I want to keep this a little shorter if I'm going to make a mistake, chin a little fuller and bigger if I'm going to make a mistake. It's always good as an artist to know which direction to go wrong, where to go wrong. If in general, as we go down, we make each thing a little bigger than it should have been: the nose a little longer, the chin a little fuller, then the neck a little longer than it should have been , the torso, the limbs, the legs. all the way down the street. By adding that length, it appears more statuesque or more heroic.
This tends to happen especially in Western art, and Western art has aesthetically taken over the world right now. With many exceptions, but in general that will be more idealized. That's why women here wear high heels, nailslonger, low-cut dresses and they put their hair up. Creates that length that seems more beautiful, more idealized. So let's look at the front view. Let me come back here. If we now go to the front, I'll just make a sphere. Notice that the eye line here... let me change here one more time. Notice that the eye line that was our midpoint was not the skull.
The skull could have been where the skull meets the neck, it could have been at that point. It could have been lower. It could have been a little lower. It could have been down here. So it doesn't necessarily have any correspondence. It could even be higher in some cases. That skull descends and crosses the point of the eye line wherever it crosses it. But the bottom of the egg is a little different. The bottom of the egg will make it a little bit fuller down here. In general, if we cut the egg in half, the ball in half, I should say.
If we take that spherical end, we cut the ball in half, one half, two halves, add another half. If I'm going to be wrong, let it be too long, a little more than half, half more instead of less. But we can use that as a construction of the head, making it a little more heroic in the jaw or not. Either way. Notice then what we have. We have a head without ears, without ears, without a hairstyle. Put them on in a second. We have a head one or two halves wide. We leave it here. And we have a head that is one, two, three halves long.
So this is almost a perfect square. It's whatever for whatever. This is a 2 x 3 ratio, two across and three down. This is because they lose skull drift when returning. Now it hides behind the face. We'll see it in a moment, the face hidden behind the skull. Let's do it. So half of the skull remains. There's the rest of that round sphere for the skull. The rest of the face mask is added to it, which is added to the other half. There is our ratio of two to one, two, three. In that middle proportion, that middle half, the ears will tend to stay there.
They can go down quite a bit. Occasionally they can rise a little higher, although it does look a bit wolfish when you do it, a bit like an elf or something. But the ears tend to sit somewhere in that middle third. They are usually symmetrical, although you will see many people who have one ear lower than the other. We will talk in detail about how to draw ear shapes later. But for now you can make a small C shape, a small egg shape, a more chiseled box shape or any variation of that. Make it more rounded at the bottom, square at the top, any of those.
You can curve them. Anything like that is fine. We'll discover that the cheek, the side of our skull egg, overlaps that ear and hides part of it. So we want to get a sense of that idea, the overlap. It is behind and below. The ear is there. And so this same rule is true, of course, what will be true from the profile will be true from the front view. Let's get back to this. So if I went back to my full shape and cut it in half, let's say here, this would be my eye line there.
That's where the upper eyelid and the lower eyelid, if we just think of it as a really simple almond, we're going to have to get more sophisticated than that. But the eye line where the upper eyelid meets the lower eyelid, if I were a little bit Egyptian, would be where the makeup line is. That's pretty much our midpoint. It's better to make, again, our half chin a little bigger for heroic reasons without the hairstyle. Then, if we cut it in half, it will be more or less the nose. The root of the nose where it meets the mouth.
Not even the tip of the nose. It could appear or it could get hooked in relation to that. So if we split it in half right here, that would be where the lips sit on that construction line. The midpoint is where the lower lip rests. The rest below is here on the chin. Now when you do this front view, again, it's without the hairstyle. Often, you put this out there and say, okay, I did everything they told me to do. It still feels funny. Sometimes you lay it out and realize that you've drawn the whole face and you haven't actually drawn the skull.
Sometimes you'll need to go back and add a little more skull, and maybe even add a little more skull this way. Again, if you added a little more chin underneath and then added more skull on top, you'll be balancing. It's not going to look funny. It's not going to look like an alien with a little face squashed down here or a little baby, something like a fetus. So having that extra chin can help. It is very easy from these front views to draw an egg. That's a really quick version of this, but notice that when I do it, it has some character.
The width up here is equal to the width down here, whereas here, even with a strong jawed male, the shapes will taper off toward the chin and fill out toward the shape of the skull. And so it's more of a chicken egg thing, where it's gradually tapering off. It is an egg more real than a simple ellipse. The other thing I'll do sometimes is notice how to add that square face mask we talked about earlier. Square this up a bit. When I do that, I notice how this line and this line are now parallel to each other.
In fact, they are parallel to the center line. We draw an imaginary center line so we can space out the features. We have a little nose on this side, more or less the same amount on that side. We have a little gap here. Then the eye begins. We have the same more or less small space here, and then that eye starts. So we have that symmetry. The eyebrows arch upward and will be symmetrical more or less an expression or something outside that natural center line. As soon as we draw, instead of the egg, a pill shape, a capsule shape, notice that when we think that way, our center line follows these more difficult positions.
Then we have the tapered chin which is very square within the jaw, or we have the rounder chin which gently rounds the jaw, whatever the character suggests. Younger, feminine, childish, be a little rounder. Square or more heroic, more superheroic, more exaggerated, more masculine, a little more square. Choose your option. Once again, while we're putting this in, divide it in half. There are the eyes. Eyebrow line somewhere in there. We'll look at the hat. Nose, lips. The rest is chin. And you could say, wow, I gave them too much of a chin or I gave her too much of a chin, and you can trim it before moving on to the next idea.
We'll figure out how to add those things in a moment. And then you say, well, I have to cover my ears. By the way, they are somewhere between the eyebrow line and the ear. Go back here to that third again and you can see the parts of the eyebrows in a broad average depending on the expressions, the character, the arch of the eyebrows may be on that third line. Notice that I can design the proportions of this head based on halves. Cut in half you have the eye line. Cut the bottom half in half again. You have the nose line.
Cut that bottom half again and you will have the bottom edge of your lower lip line. So having below gives you your information, or we can do it in thirds. We can say that from the top of the skull without hair downwards, one third is the eyebrow line. Go down another third that is close to the nose line. A third lower you are at the chin. The hairline would be within that division. So there are several ways to do it. But in any case, we'll go between the eyebrow line and the nose line for those thirds, one third, two thirds, three thirds.
From the nose to the chin are three thirds. From the eyebrow to the nose are the middle two thirds. The first third is the top. And then we add our ear somewhere symmetrically placed. Then we realize that we need a little more skull, perhaps because we just drew a capsule that was perfectly symmetrical. It showed the shape of the face, it didn't give us that fuller skull shape. And then we go from there to build the hairline and all that good stuff in the way of hair styling and all that. Well, that's our basic idea. Now coming back to this.
Once you have a good chin, a good back of the skull, however you made it; A good chin, a good back of the skull can be quite sophisticated, very sophisticated, more of what we do here, more as we will do later, or the simplest possible choice. In any case, it is something relatively simple, although characteristic. Now I can find the neck right next to this chin. Watch what happens here. The chin goes back. It is called the digastric plane. That is the thickness of the face. One of the dangers of drawing the face mask is that it looks like just a mask.
If you look at it from some weird angle, it looks like a cardboard cutout Halloween mask with your features cut out there, and it's not convincing. So what we need to feel is that lower plane of the face. It gives it thickness. That's called the digastric plane. Here it gives thickness from different angles, as we will see later. We will find it more clearly and it will give us a great volume. It will keep it from looking flat and cropped. Notice that we are working on a flat page and yet we are trying to get the idea of ​​volume.
That is always an obstacle that the artist must overcome. So we move forward through the digastric plane and then down the throat. If there is a large Adam's apple, we ignore it and back away. Unless you're a ballet dancer or a soldier standing at attention, there's usually a bit of sag. I'll exaggerate it. A little sinking. So neck to chin, from the base of the neck to the chin, push forward. That gives us that even in a fairly vertical view there is a forward momentum that has this beautiful forward movement. We will discover that this becomes a dance of shapes that runs through the entire body.
So chin across the simplified neck to the base of the neck. Anywhere here is fine. You made it too long. You went too far back or a little without pushing forward enough. Anywhere there you'll probably be fine. Keep in mind that making it too long is a much better mistake than making it too short. Length for the next form, form number one, form number two, construction number one to construction number two. Every time the next structure along the body is a little longer is a better mistake, a better mistake than making the other way around. But anywhere we are fine.
So let's choose one. Now I'm going to come out of the back of the skull, coming out of the back of the skull. Anywhere here is good. Your only real guideline will be to not make it too thin or too thick. Make sure the collar speaks to the character or model. Is he a big guy with a bull neck or is he a long, wispy neck? Make sure it rings true. And if you're a little off or you should have made it a little chubbier, you should have made it a little thinner, you can always add more later when you realize that.
As long as you're in the stadium, you're fine. Notice this big change here. Notice how far down the chin begins; sorry, the collar starts in the front. Notice how high. It may not be that high. It could be anywhere here. Once again, you have room for error. Notice how high, let's choose this one in the middle. Notice how much higher the neck connects to the head structure at the back. It connects very high in the back. It connects very low in front. Getting that high and low will be what gives you credibility. Notice when we put on our costumes here (let me button this up), notice how my shirt follows that same high-low.
Notice how the neck sits high in the back and low in the front, following the same neck twisting dynamic. That will take us in a very interesting way inside the body. We'll see it again a little later. Joke, joke, joke about it. If I were a little fatter, I would be here. Anywhere there is good, as long as it's close and high up. So my two parameters are to make the neck on the stadium the correct thickness. Don't make it too thin. Don't make it too fat. If it's too far from here it's a problem. If it's up to here, it's a problem.
Somewhere in that middle range of thickness. And make sure the neck connects with the skull or under the hairstyle. Maybe the hairstyle does this. Make sure your neck feels connected to your skull high on your back. Make sure it feels like it connects face down and you're done. Now if we go to a front view we will find that in a younger model, a child, a young adult, many times you will get a thinner neck. Not always, but on average. So if you make it slimmer, it will look younger and/or more feminine. If you make it thicker, it will look more masculine, a little older, mature and more heroic.
If you then get a very aged model, it can make you thinner again. But if you want to make a heroic male like Loomis did as I mentioned before, you will make the neck almost as wide or as wide, depending only on the jawline of the male. If you want it to be more feminine or younger, basicallyYou'll make the neck a little narrower than the thickest part of the jawline somewhere around the nose line. Where the nose line is, that is the widest part of the jaw because it comes out from that big ball of the head, the skull, before narrowing down to the thin, narrow chin.
So any place here is good. The only time you're going to make it much bigger is if you have some lineman for the 49, you know, some football team, some kind of huge athlete, bodybuilder, you know, all that kind of stuff. Or you're drawing a superhero, a hyper-heroic character, you know, a comic book Captain America, Hulk, that kind of thing. But the average normal person, the average mature athletic man, will not get any wider than that. Notice when we added: Let's do it again down here. When we go low in front and high in back, pay special attention to the thickness of the neck and correct accordingly.
We're making a sort of hourglass shape. Now the head can actually articulate on the torso and rotate that neck in all kinds of things back and forth. You can pinch it like an accordion, stretch it and pinch it like an accordion. But in general, most of the time you will feel that hourglass idea. That kind of thing happens. So when it's more contoured, think hourglass. When it comes to a more front or back view, think tube, just a simple tube. It is a rigid and straight tube if it is a guard standing at attention. Or it is a curved tube if the head is in some dynamic position relative to the body.
So it can curve like this. Alright, now let's start looking at other positions here. We have the basics. What happens if we fall behind? Well, from the front the shape of the mask with all the features dominates the skull. You don't see much skull. In fact, drawing that capsule or tube idea shows that you can make a pretty good head. Then just top it off with some skull you missed. In the rear view everything is skull. And the face is hidden. That creates a different set of problems. So what we're going to find, and again we're our best models.
We will notice that the skull is now in front of you, facing the camera. In front of the viewer of our work of art. I notice that it goes down to the neck, of course. Whatever hairstyle is there. But the head, skull and neck go together. The face is around the front, hidden. So like I said, it will create its own set of problems. The big, simple way is easier. We don't have all those pesky features to carefully map out proportions halves and thirds and all our choices and proportions. But it will be more difficult to place this in space and be effective with it.
It will be very easy to make it look like a lollipop, just a ball on a stick. It won't be very satisfactory. So what I'm going to do is pay special attention to how the neck fits. Let's go back to the front view again and do a quick version of our face. We have room for error in these types of things. Just do that so you understand the meaning of things. Then we had that neck tube from a front view, we said. We just stopped it there. It was curved or straight, but it was just a tube.
The fact is that when I'm learning any particular part of the body, the head, the hands, the ribcage, whatever, I want to pay some attention; In fact, I want to pay special attention to how it connects with the other or others, the other parts of the body. So I want to know how the rib cage connects to the shoulder girdle and to the head and neck and definitely how it connects to the pelvis. I want to know how the thigh connects to the hips and down to the lower leg. In this case I want to know how the head and neck connect to the shoulder line and then to the rib cage.
So let's talk a little about that. We will move away from our topic so that when we master it and have confidence in it, we can integrate it into the complete figure that is likely to be our goal. Even if we are doing a

portrait

, a bust, you know,

portrait

commissions are our daily bread. We still have to show that connectivity. Very rarely do we float our heads with nothing. So always pay attention to the connections. When I draw from life or from references, I spend several drawings, maybe one in five working on the connections. Or if I have more time to lay on a good head, then I'll go ahead and put in some of the connective tissue, the connective forms for the shoulder line, so I can feel it move into that new hole.
So if I were putting these two together and had more time, I would go for the connection at the elbow. I spend more time drawing and analyzing that to feel a safer, truer connection with my audience and a better understanding for myself. So the connection, the joints are key, the transition points where you go from one part to the next are key in our understanding, so we need a little information. So head and neck. Now, the mouth of the neck will be somewhere down here. Again, another third of a head. Then you can use the skull or hairline with the heroic pose and with a fuller skull.
Notice how the hairline is a good place to pick one-third, one-third, two-thirds to the nose, three-thirds to the chin. Notice that I didn't do a great job of making my thirds. This is too much. This is very little. Maybe this is the right thing to do. And it's still forgiving, right? It still feels good, pretty good. If it doesn't look like our model because we're drawing a guy with a big chin, we can always add a little more if necessary. So we have room for error. We don't have to nail exactly. If we are sculptors we can always add a little more clay later or remove a little clay as needed.
This goes down. The collar will end at the base of the neck in front. As I said, it's another third equal to these, more or less. If I'm going to screw it up, I better make it very long and make it more than half. Often, if you are making a statuesque woman, you will give her a longer neck. It's more attractive. It seems to be more in terms of the classical Greco-Roman sense, that the longer neck is more attractive. The male, bull neck, a little shorter is fine. So any range between that third and half takes us to the mouth of the neck.
Let's stick with the third one, which is usually more accurate on average. Now what I'm going to find is that I'm going to have a shoulder line, and the shoulder line can be, you can select any of several anatomical points, and I won't go into the details of that. But anywhere here is fine. Anywhere you go from top to side, shoulder line to arm transition. Here, here, here. We have margin for error. It doesn't matter. Choose a place. You can choose it right at the collarbone or, sorry, right at the base of the neck. It can be a little bit up there, anywhere up there.
It's usually a little bit higher up and it's usually more accurate because we have that slightly slouched posture that I talked about that falls to the base of the neck. If you stand at attention like this, then it gets closer to the shoulder line. But any place there is great. Shoulder line. Then we will have the shoulder shrug muscles, the trapezius. They will be the transition that you will have to take from the tubular neck to the shoulder line. It's just a sunken triangle. But it is a triangle. It feels good to do that, so sometimes I take more time just to tighten it, but basically what I'm looking for is for it to go right behind my neck.
Where is he going? Behind the neck tube. Here is the tube. This is an upper and posterior muscle. Descend to the middle of the back, trapezius. It's a shrugging muscle. It basically does this. So all I'm going to do is make a fallen triangle. The thinner I make the neck, the more I sink it. The younger and more feminine you will look. The thicker I make the neck and the fuller; in fact, you can stand out this way even if you're playing a heroic character. The fuller you make that triangle, the more mature it will look.
Not old as in the elderly, but more mature and more masculine and also more heroic, of course. So Superman could be here. A star soccer player could be here. The average kid on the street could be there. An old man or woman could be down here. But any place there is good as long as it is similar to what we see, characteristic of what we see. It's usually a sunken triangle, like I said. Note that we have done this: we will now default to one type, the most heroic male. This is the neck that comes from behind the face, goes down and actually just fades away.
In subtle ways that we will address in another group of lectures. Not in the leading group. This is the muscle that shrugs behind it. So you can imagine going up and joining the school and coming back. We'll see it in a moment. Then we have the neck in front of that dropped triangle. The tube is in front of the triangle. The neck is in front of the trapezius. And if we drew this as a really simple tube that we're slightly below, we would feel that. It's behind. So now when we come here, I'll do the same.
I don't have the face mask though. I'm going to draw the triangle tube and make it nice and fat and wide or nice and thin, however I see fit. I'll do that. Let's color code it. In fact, it will connect here. There is the neck of our heroic male, let's say. He sticks here even though the egg is much lower down. It doesn't get anywhere. If you sat back there, you could feel that. They are basically two cables that split around the spine. They have thickness, so it goes up like this, sinks like this, and sits on the shoulder line.
We'll do more masculine looking art because it's a long, pretty full trapezoid, let's make it a little fuller and we've got that nice wide neck. That's what does most of the work. Notice that here we have the neck tube in front of the triangle. Now we have the triangle in front of the neck like this. Pretty sophisticated stuff there. Since we don't have all the features to mark, this seems pretty easy to me now. I just have to lay this out basically with construction lines and little dashes in effect for the location, the approximate location of the features.
I can do this little kind of robotic schematic line, all that good stuff. That's pretty easy compared to this. There are some sophisticated ideas afoot. Notice we had the neck and then the face mask was in front of the neck. So the face is in front of the neck. The neck is in front of the trapezius, the shoulder shrug muscle. From the rear view it is reversed. The triangle, the trapezius shrug muscle, is closest to us. The neck is further away, and the face, unless we have a huge neck, we will see a little bit of the face, the face is even further away.
A little bit of face. A bit of a face for that wider chin and thinner neck ratio. Then notice where the ears were almost an afterthought. We put them because they are visible and deserve to be there. But they didn't really add much information, any new information to the mix. It was just a matter of mapping out one more detail, like choosing glasses. When I put on glasses, it doesn't really give me any more information, just a new shape there. And so, from a front view, this direct front view, the ears don't add much more than a more refined character to what we were looking at.
But here the ears are going to be much more important because they will be the only feature we will see. All other features are hidden on that far side. That's why drawing those ears is important. Notice how I drew them. I just drew them like that. I actually made a little double line or a thick dark construction either way, and that shows the thickness of the ear. As we progress through building the ear, we will do segments and chapters on each feature in detail. There is a lot to understand with each and every function. One of the things we'll notice is that the C shape or any hybrid shape that we draw has a thickness.
Otherwise, it will be monotonous and not believable. It will have a thickness such as the mask had the idea of ​​the thickness of the digastric plane. Then we could draw the ear from a front view like this to show that thickness. Think of it as a disk, a piece of tube like that. So when we put the cheek on it, we see a lot of that disc or cut, and the rest is hidden. From a rear view, we will see the entire thickness of the back of the ear here. That's what we're drawing. So drawing a double line shows us that thickness.
We don't have to worry about all these subtle things here because right now they're just a construct. This is the simplest and most characteristic thing we can do. Again, it's in that middle third range. But it's harder to see that it's not like that because the chin is lost down here. The hair is here but we can't see the eyebrow line. We can't see the hairline, so we can't inch to that position or inch to that position. So it's a little more complicated. Then you'll have the hairline, it'll do whatever it does, maybe a little ducktail shape here, or whatever, you know,long hair covers whatever is happening there.
But we'll just do that. That's there. Each of these little details, you know, you could have a little spiral swirl here, or it could be a bun or a ponytail. Hair, any of those details will help you. Notice that we can take the head of the skull again, I should say the skull, the face and the neck, and we can turn all of this into a simpler idea, just a tube, something like this idea. So I'm going to make a tube and then here's the line of my shoulders, let's say. And then I need to go over those machinations we just went through again.
Let's see, this is the center of the head. It's right here. That's that. There's the neck. Here are the ears here. You can rotate them this way if it's the full rear view, you can rotate them in the same direction if they start to become sort of three-quarters. So if this head starts to turn a little bit in this direction, then we can turn the ear in that direction. Then we can place it in that middle range of the structure. Maybe we'll see a bit of the jaw entering the chin before it's lost. Maybe we won't.
That's that. That gives us a basis for connection. We're still not showing any articulation to do this kind of thing. We'll deal with that later. But that gives us the basics. The last thing I want, I should have mentioned before and I didn't: let's do this. Ear. When we placed that ear, we said that if we look at it from a front or back view, the ear is located in the middle third of the head or so. You can use the top of the skull or you can use the hairline. I usually use the hairline. It feels a little more precise.
It ends up making the features a little fuller and gives the chin a little more oomph. When we wear the top of the skull, the chin often feels a little shorter and the nose may be too big. But anyway, any place there is good. Thus, the ear is located in the middle part of the head. There is a section above. There is a section at the bottom. The midsection is where the ears more or less float. They occupy the entire section. They are smaller than that. They may be slightly below or slightly above. But they are in that middle range.
When we get to a profile we can see the same thing happening. Let's put our box back here and look at the way I drew it. Bad teacher. It should be a little less here and a little more here. There is our box. There is our box more or less without features or hairstyle, a little longer in length, a little shorter in width. Note that if we reach that area of ​​the sideburns in front of the ear, we cut it in half, the ear is very close to the midpoint of the head there. So, half the ear or the whole ear is placed in the center of the head, from top to bottom, however you want to do it.
Half of the ear is in the middle, the ear is in the middle third. Make your choice, it doesn't matter. Plus, it's in the middle like this. The front of the ear touches or comes very close to that midrange. More or less features and hairstyle. Like. It is located in that middle range. That's incredibly helpful because now look what happens. If I take that same form, now I will use the simplest form possible. Take that same sailboat shape. If I take this section here, cut it in half and put it there, I'll make sure it's roughly in the bottom third.
But if you're clueless, notice how this got much bigger. This became much shorter. It doesn't really hurt at all, but you can adjust or trim it accordingly. But when I do that it looks like a nice profile like this. Let's do it again. I'm going to draw that same sailboat shape. Now, instead of placing it more or less in the middle area, I'm going to put it very close or quite close to the front of the face. When you do that, now notice that the face, the jaw, the face, is always in front of the ear.
It ends in front of the ear. It doesn't go behind the ear. It is located in front of the ear. Some people will draw that ear and then put the face back here. It has to be in front of the ear. Look what a face there is now. Let me develop this a little. I'll show you how to do this another time, but just so you can see it. There is a little bit of nose, a little bit of lips, eyebrow, eyelashes, hairstyle. Let's do this to make it easier for us. There is the right thickness of the neck.
We will address how to articulate this later. Let's leave it that way. Notice that if I push the ear towards the front of the face, I will have done this. You've gotten behind your head. The more we push that ear toward the front of the face until it overlaps slightly off-axis, it will overlap perfectly in a rear view. That ear positions the head in this way in rotation. Now when we have a front part of the face, it is less important because we have all the features. Once we get past the profile, those features, look at what the features are like, the nose.
And again, we'll look at this in more detail later. The nose, lips and eyelashes are overlapped by that cheek and jaw construction. We are starting to lose them. So, placing that ear, let's do it again. Now I'm going to push the ear back here. I'll keep it in the middle third or so. I'll make it a little smaller, a little bigger, anywhere in there. I can always adjust it slightly if needed. Now notice how the ear pushes back towards or equal to the posterior edge less and less, more and less. Now we start to get a three-quarter view.
Notice now that if we make the center line of the features, it would be here and we would be in a three-quarter view there. Then placing the ear, tightens the skull. You're more of a three-quarter front view. It clutters the face, you have more of a three-quarter rear view. Place the ears outward or very close to the outside, you will be in a full or more or less full rear view. Place them on the outside in front, same goes for the front view. So when you push your ear one way or another, you get incredible information.
It gives your audience incredible information very, very quickly about how you fit in the space. Okay, so hearing is a wonderful thing. This is the simplest of our options and my favorite for these simple builds. If I'm doing a very careful portrait, I'll break up the shape of the skull and face carefully. But I almost always start with this. Even if I'm painting a big picture with a big full head, it's easier to place. Let me talk about hearing again. So, like I said, if we bring our ear closer to the face, we'll get behind that face.
We will notice that the forehead, cheek, jaw begin to overlap and cover our features. They hide. That's true, of course. The same if I squeeze the skull. Now he turns to us. And we don't need any more information than that to start getting the idea that we're now in a three-quarter front view. We're certainly going to want to do more, but immediately that gives us and our viewer, our audience, a clue as to where we stand. But also notice if I push my ear down; let me do this. I'm going to understand that skull more fully.
In fact, I'm going to make it square because when I get into difficult perspectives, the squarer I make things, the more clearly they sit in space. It's the corners and the alignment of the sides that, because of our vanishing points, if we were so ambitious and gave us a sense of true position. If I do roundness, and again, check out my basic drawing lessons for a full explanation of this. But the rounder things are that it may have a good sense of rendered volume, but it doesn't have a great sense of position. Are you behind this ball or in front of this ball?
Until you get something else about it, you won't know. But here you immediately know how he is sitting, that he is leaning forward, leaning in a certain three-dimensional position. So the squarer things are, the better in terms of crafting difficult perspectives, difficult proportions because we can break down those corners into measurable segments and difficult dynamic objects. Notice that by pushing that ear a little bit lower from a, generically let's do this and this one, two, three. Let's say they are the same and we put the ear right in the middle in one way and another. That is a perfect profile.
We would add all the things. I am going to tell some things so that you can feel the truth of that idea. That's a perfect profile, more or less proportions, of course, of the character you're drawing. If I move it this way it rotates. If I move this way, it rotates. If I push it up or down, it will now rotate... well, not rotate, but rather tilt in and out of the image plane. So by pushing the ear down a little bit, I'm going to exaggerate it here. We'll see this better when we have some reference and make more sophisticated versions of these things.
But for now this is as far as we're going to go. There are those kinds of things. Again, I'll help you figure this out more carefully later, but just so you can see it in context. Notice how we have the ear, less than an ear from the chin, or even say a full ear from the chin. Here we have ear and a half or ear and two thirds from the top of the head. That was not true here. Here we were very united. So as the ear descends, we begin to climb onto it. You can see it right here.
Here's my ear somewhere in between. Now, as I do this, the chin moves back, so the ear moves closer to the bottom of the head structure, and the skull moves closer and reveals more, so visually we have more mass on top. And then, of course, the opposite would happen. Push your head down. We are overhead, right on top of a tube. Push your head up. Sorry, raise your ear. It will make us feel like we are under our heads. Again, I'll show you the subtleties of this later. I'm putting them up now so you can clearly visualize what I'm saying.
Note that when you place these very simple shapes, sometimes you have to modify them to make them sound true for that particular dynamic position. In simpler positions we can make simpler shapes in more dynamic positions. It's a difference between looking at a box or looking at a box. In the more dynamic positions we have to articulate those shapes with a little more care. You may need to lift a little. You need to square yourself a little. Note also that we can think of this as a box shape. I'll keep it very simple here. Again, I'll describe and explain those structural things later, but we can make it more of a square.
So the ear can be on the side of the box. And the features could be on the front of the box. The ear can be on the side of the case and all other features are on the front of the case. Or we can have it as a tubular idea. We can conceive this, what is underneath is not a box but a tubular idea. And the ear is on the side of the tube and the rest of the features are on the front of the tube, like this. Front of the tube. Notice what I'm doing here.
Just generically I'm going to make the eyebrow line, specifically the arch of the eyebrow, at the height of the ear. That won't be true for all models, or even most models, but it's more or less true. Often the ear will be close to the eye line, but I love those arched eyebrows. We will see this when we get into a more sophisticated structure. If I use the brow line to the ear I have a natural build line, whether I'm doing a tube or a square idea, a tube or a square idea, notice this is the brow line and this is the movement of the ear. .
It can be a rounder conception or a more square conception. Here are the eyes. Here is the nose. We'll talk about how to do that. Here is the mouth, the chin. Notice that now I have to flesh out my skull or my hairstyle to make it sound real. There is a square conception. There is a more complete conception. The chin is at the bottom of the tube, or the chin is at the bottom of the box. Choose your option. Of course, we could make it like an egg. We could do from the line of the eyebrows to the high line of the ears.
Nose, mouth, chin. Adjust that jaw line. Again, make sure you have enough skull there. Often you have to add a small skull to these things. Add a small skull or refine the skull. Well. And then we add... if it is more frontal than lateral we add the tube. If it is further back than on the side, we add the tube. If it is more lateral than frontal we can do the hourglass idea. If it's somewhere in between, three-quarters, you can choose; do either of the two things. So this would also work well, hourglass in those three quarters.
Alright, that's the basic shape of the head in a basic articulated perspective. No deep perspective. We conceive it as simple shapes, simple shapes. It can be a simple shape that is square, a simple shape that is more tubular, a simple shape that is very round. It can be a hybrid of all those things. The choice does not matter as long as it is simple, but characteristic of what we see. It does not radically deviate fromwhat we see unless we are making a radical work of art. We're going to pay close attention that whatever we do at the end, we feel the skull move back as the face descends.
The skull drips back, the face falls. Unless it is very close to a full front or back view, we will feel that the skull has a distinctive backward movement. You can think of a hair part. If you have a hairstyle like this where the part is. The piece will run along that axis back to the skull. Alright, there's one last point I want to make here before we continue. If we look at our skull to get this idea of ​​our ear, the ear is more or less here. Remember that the ear is located just behind the end of the jaw.
The jaw is located just in front of the ear. So this is the hairline sideburns area. The ear is located here. So look at this little dot or my finger here. As we turn in this direction, you can see how the ear crowds into the face and eventually overlaps the face. That was the point we were making earlier. Then when we come back here, the ear... let's do this for the ear, I guess. The ear will crowd into the back of the skull and then overlap the back of the skull. So that ear gives us a great reference point for how this thing turns, especially in this rear three-quarter range where we don't have the features as reference points.
These features are fantastic reference points for plotting the structure, the three-dimensional position of the head. When we get into this rear three-quarter view, rear view to the other side, we lose that ammo. Then hearing becomes crucial. So there we have it. Likewise, if we tilt, let's say this is the top of the ear, as we tilt the head down, notice how the ear now visually occupies the bottom of the face and moves far away from the top of the face. So if you draw that ear lower on your skull shape, on your sailboat shape, or on whatever building idea you're using, it will help you immediately put that head in that higher orientation.
Likewise, if it comes this way and the top of the ear starts to crowd the top of the head, now we know it's underneath. Once again, proving it becomes a great milestone, especially in these positions. Anyway, that little point. Now let's move on to our master drawings and have fun. Well, now we have to look at our old masters. We have Hans Holbein on the left and Raphael on the right. If we look at the Holbein we can see the egg. Notice we have a hat here and that's why the skull is up here. If I draw that basic egg shape, we would see that the hat is up here.
Remember, though, when we make the egg shape, it will be much more accurate for what we're looking for if we make the egg shape a little thicker at the top, more like a real chicken egg than an ellipse. We can do it. Or we could make it more of a capsule shape, which means it's flat on the sides. Notice if we look towards the hairline. I'm going to modify the hairline slightly towards the lower jaw. You can feel that kind of flattening there. The problem with that is that we go back. Let me get that color back.
The problem with that is that he has those wonderful cheekbones. So what I'm looking for is a simple shape, egg or capsule, but the most characteristic. And that's why I want to feel those fine cheekbones standing out. Let's do it this way. And maybe the bulging egg. You could even modify it further. Notice that with this particular character we could modify. Maybe we'll use more of a diamond shape to highlight those cheekbones. Again, make sure the diamond does not deform and lose the mass of the skull, but perhaps through the hairline we put a small diamond shape inside the egg.
Please note that this is simply a feature and there are a wide variety of variations we can make. We can modify that shape. It can be elliptical. It may be capsule-shaped. It may be egg-shaped. It has a thicker end and a narrower end. It can be more and more diamond-shaped. There are many options there. Round on top, square on the bottom. You have many ways to go. As long as it is simple but characteristic, you choose. And if you're doing refined heads, portraits, or trying to bring personality instead of a generic sense of an A head but a head with personality, then you'll want to modify those shapes.
Simple but characteristic. You want to be agile with it. If you look at Raphael, his features are plumper. So the egg is fuller, rounder and more (a little bigger here) and more characteristically a classic egg. Whereas at the Holbein we could argue for a fairly square butt due to this woman's strong jawline. But with the Raphael that is the case. Of course, we're also going for the little baby here. We are looking for that egg shape, beautiful, simple and much more authentic. In any of these cases there are large subtle variations in the final contour. It wobbles, it bumps, it sharpens, it softens, it does all those different things that an outline is going to do, but that's in the finished stage.
Again, we keep it simple but distinctive. As I did with Rafael, the mother and the child, we can see that simple construction lines show us the center line, the eye line, the eyebrow line, the hair line, the nose and chin line. Darken that for us a little bit. And then we can divide that basic idea into proportion, just a general generic proportion about half way. In this case it is not entirely true. Let's leave it there. It's a little more than halfway to the top. The top part catches more and the bottom part a little less.
And with the hairstyle it is even more exaggerated. But actually it is, the position of this head is actually slightly below us. She is leaning forward. So if we put a bucket on his head, we would be on top of the bucket like that. That means that if we were to draw our construction line, it would stay the same. This line, of course, would then go in this direction. And so the eyes move in a slight arc. And as we find that tilt with the ears and so on, we lose when it moves into the paper, we lose a little bit of face on the bottom end.
It's getting a little shorter each time. The head rises above towards us. We're getting a little more head lift. Note that what I drew here is a more exaggerated version than what our friend Raphael has done, and that adds even more skull to the view. This one has more skull. This one has less skull. This one has much less face and this one a little more. Here's an exaggerated version of the slight tilt. This is a slight tilt compared to this one, which is perfectly straight and formal. Notice that even the craftsmanship highlights this, but just in terms of design, when we have a very formal pose like this, look at what affects the feel of the piece.
Notice how this is more distant. Now she has that character, but that's one of the reasons she chose this front view. She is very formal and distant, while this is a mother who has great empathy. Then we feel that empathy and we are attracted to it. So the slight tilt of the head off-axis and the slight tilt of the head within the picture plane adds that intimacy and that informal or compassionate view. So this little baby is doing what he's doing like this. Those baby proportions would have an effect that we'll save for another day. Again, there is always a great danger when we draw these egg- and capsule-shaped constructions of the head.
Notice that in this mother figure here I drew the egg without enough of a skull. So the skull would actually be out here, a fuller egg this way. And then pay close attention to that. It's a real killer for your drawing if you don't give that fullness to that skull. Loses character. If you're doing a cartoon or something that might actually fit the style, but in realism you have to feel that full skull. You're usually safe even if you mess up your build. Even if I had stuck with that original construction, by the time we add the hair, the mass of hair in there, that will cover that mistake.
But we still want to see it as a truism. Basically, we're going to draw the egg head or any simple shape, the egg head. Then we're going to draw a T, center line, center line, eye line. That will divide it in half. Two people here, two halves here. More or less, more or less the dynamic position of the head. More or less the portrait, the personality, the extravagant proportions of the head, but a middle ground. So let's build on that. Notice that the hat band here acts more or less as the hairline. And so, if we divide it into the hairline and the eyebrow line, from the eyebrow line to the nose line, from the nose line to the mouth and to the chin.
Those end up being about thirds. Now, if you have a more dynamic, dramatic, heroic figure, you can go up to the top of the head, which would be the top of the skull minus the hairstyle, and make thirds down, a fuller nose, and that's more true in this case. Then the chin, despite its strength, the chin and the jaw are a little less strong because it is a woman, a more heroic character especially if it is a man, a mature man, it would be down here and you can break the thirds. But usually on a realistic figure, if you're not trying to stylize heroism into the mix, you go from the hairline to the brow line to the nose line to the chin, and those are the thirds. .
The eye line is below there, and that's the midpoint. Top of head to eye line, from eye line to chin. Alright, here we have Piazetta with a more or less perfect profile, somewhere close to that. Let's look at this from two different ways. Notice the strong line here. We want to be careful with that. What I really want is the line of the face. I'm cutting features. Specifically, we'll see this more clearly when we get into the location of traits and all of their various structures. I want to go to where the forehead, more or less, where the forehead meets the nose right there and where the lips meet. on the chin right there.
So these two points end up somewhere near the hairline. Of course, that can change radically depending on the recession. It may be something similar to that. It doesn't have to be right on the money, but there. That is the gesture of the face going down on which I am going to build my structure, my mask. The gesture of the skull receding, I don't want to go down like this and form a more or less right angle. What I wanted to do is get up and back away. In reality it is, only the drawing fools us for a moment.
Then go up this way. Notice how that opens up there. That angle opens up a little bit from a right angle. If we were to make that sailboat shape, it would be here or here. Anywhere in there is fine. If they were egg shapes, let's bring this back. In fact, if you wanted, you could start with the skull egg that I'm here, down here. Anywhere within this range is good. Then you come out of that egg, back to your build or your face emote line. This is an egg that has an axis going backwards, but notice the way I drew it, it's actually going backwards and up a little bit.
Again, it involves opening that angle. Let's make this clearer. Look what happens if I go the other way like this. Destroys the structure of the skull. That's bad news. Or if we had the face going down and the skull shape doing this. We'll see Raphael towards the end of our little series here, and this suggests this. We have to be, we have to look beyond a glance to see what he is doing there. But if we do that, where this falls, it destroys the skull. You don't have enough brain to be a functional human being when you do that.
So we don't want to do that. We want it to open. Then we can separate the back of the skull like this and make a modified triangle, or as we said before, we can use a simplified hairline in front of the ear and up to the chin down here and feel the face mask, that mask here . Notice how the ear is located right in the center. Now he's just moving away from us, so in this case his ear is a little closed. It varies from person to person and also from canon to canon. Each artist and artistic movement will idealize or distort the figure in a certain way, so will sometimes play rather loosely with the facts.
In this case we have the ear or the center of the ear, as I said, right in the middle of the head even without the little bit of hair standing up. But anyway, it follows our idea faithfully enough, close enough to work with. Notice how the top of your ear lines up with your brow line. That's something we want to constantly capture wherever the brow line is. Generally, where the eyebrow arch is, we want the ear to be there or close to it. That will give us a lot of good material forwork when we adopt more dynamic postures, as we will do in a moment.
Notice how the bottom of the ear sits there roughly at the bottom of the nose. And then the ear is located in that middle third. And by keeping it away from the top of the skull and the bottom of the skull, the bottom of the chin/face, it gives us that feeling that we're looking more or less directly at this figure, maybe a little bit. on top. Anyway, the location of the ear in the middle from left to right, in the middle region from top to bottom, gives us the feeling that this is a solid basic profile.
Alright, here's a Tiepolo. Here you can see the simple building idea that was never taken further. We have mom here with a simple egg shape, but since she's off axis, she's in three-quarter view, so we'll get a little bit of the skull here. So let's go back and look at that again and see exactly what our friend is doing here. There is the center line of those characteristics. Here is the eyebrow line or the eye line, the T idea. Notice how when we begin to enter into these perspectives, we begin to deviate from the axis of a perfect forehead or a perfect profile and then our T begins to take dynamic positions.
The head is tilted downward so the T is tilted. We're below and in a three-quarter view of the brow line and eye line. The eyebrow and eye line tilt upward, so that T adopts a dynamic position. So let's look at that one more time. There are several ways we can do this. We can draw the shape of our sailboat and we can cover the entire head. Notice how we come back here. There it is there. Or we could have started with this center line going back and then added a little more, or started outside and put in the center line.
Either way is fine. Then the eyebrow line or the eye line. I usually do the brow line because you get those arched brows. There is a clear, drawn shape of the brow rather than a slightly vaguer feeling of where the eye is. So I use that to place it and then work with the proportions from there. The other way we could have done it, of course, is with the egg shape. I don't want to give the whole thing an egg shape. That's too crude. That's simple but uncharacteristic. There are two ways here. As soon as we go from a front view to a profile view or even a back view, we will see the shape of the face and the shape of the skull, so we need a construction strategy that shows both.
So I want the shape of the face as a mask. It can be more round or more square. His is much rounder. Other artists would make it more square. The center line goes through there. The eyebrow line is there. Eyeline if you wanted that is there too. Then we are going to add a little bit of the skull egg. Notice that as soon as we do that, we're going to do that gesture down for the face, and back for the skull that we need to have. Let's look at our little baby character here. Here we have the face tilted like this, eyebrow line, center line.
Sometimes it helps to make the construction lines first. Sometimes is better. It's probably usually best to make the face, gesture, and structure big and built. There it is there. Then we add the center line. We ended up with that sailboat shape. It is very pointed. It has those corners. So maybe because this is a baby, we'll start with the skull egg first because that kind of dominates. We are in a three-quarter view and the head is tilted downward. So we have that strong egg shape. Then we add a rounder mask here, picking up our construction lines like this.
The eyes are here like this and you can mark them. Let's do it one more time. There is the shape of the skull. Here is the shape of the face. Here we can complete it or leave it open, as appropriate. Since we don't have a hairline, it's a little easier to imagine it as something open. Here's the center line, the eyebrow line there. You can see a little bit of the ear here. Right there is a little bit of the ear. Now notice, as you have already done, I am sure, the simple conception of this. He is simply analyzing ideas.
This is a sketch for a painting, a mural painting that was going to be on some wall or high ceiling. Notice that he is conceiving this. This will be this beautifully finished, beautifully lit, beautifully rendered little baby Jesus, and it's just starting out as an egg. Notice that the whole conception of that skull, if we remove it from the construction of the face and the idea that it is a head, is just an egg. If I were to draw just one egg and then light it with a light source equivalent to the one we have here, it would look very similar to that.
I would do that or I would do that or I would do this. I would make some version, more or less a variation of what we see there. And so, we'll start by drawing the basic shape of the shadow of the forehead, casting the features into the shadow, in this case in any way that approximates a simple egg on a table. And that's the secret to inventing things from your head. That's a secret to animating things, conceiving things as such a simple idea that we can represent it in quite a bit of detail. We can move it in space.
We can redesign it, reimagine it to be more dynamic, into alien eggs, monster eggs, heroic eggs and all that kind of stuff for the design. Let's return once again to our figure of the feminine. We can see how again the simple conception of Mommy here, the marked eye sockets give us a clear idea of ​​where her eyes would be, but not with much precision. It's more or less true. This eye here perhaps strays too far to the left. Her nose gets a little darker here. The nose is probably too short for it. Maybe even the face is a little long, but probably not when you get to the bottom of the chin here and the rest is the inferior plane, the digastric plane here.
But anyway, there are or could be quite a few bugs there. We finished that and maybe discovered that he should have had a little more skull, especially with the hooded head or the hairstyle. All those little things. She should have been here but she ended up here. It should have been here but it ended up here. Those small variations are not a big deal and will be easily corrected as we progress through the drawing. As long as we get a pretty close approximation, it doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to stress about it. Simple but characteristic.
And as we simplify it and give it basic features, the variations then don't matter. Those subtle inaccuracies don't matter. They can be corrected or left as a stylization or as a charming variation. Well, here we have another Rafael. A beautiful head, one of the most famous drawings of the Renaissance. We can see again the simple conception. In fact, if you look at just the hair, you can see that the hair itself is egg-shaped, right? You know, we can feel kind of eggs here and little eggs here, the renaissance curls. A lot of roundness there. Eggs were huge in the Renaissance because they suggested the Christian idea of ​​rebirth.
And the egg was a potential life coming into the world, so it was used as a symbol of religious paintings that often were. This was a saint in this case, and so it fits with that. Let's go ahead and find our ways now. So we have a bit of a dynamic position. It's a three-quarter view. That means we'll see a lot of faces and some skull, and we're at the top of the view. That means the skull will dominate the face, so we'll see even more skull and a little less face. Now when you get a very difficult challenging position, and this is not extreme.
We'll talk about that in another chapter, but it's either extreme enough when we start to cause us problems, or subtle enough that if we stray a little from things we lose our sense of position and it gets out of control. for us. So if we have a difficult position or a difficult shape, something that is challenging, a lot of times I go to the construction lines first. Let me bookmark this here so I have it and try it later. Here's that center line going down. There's that construction line, the brow line that goes here, with or without the eye line.
Choose your option. That's why sometimes it's better to start right. Then you can build on that sailboat shape. Notice how far away, say, the real chin is without a beard. Watch how far your mind ends up from constructed tips. This should end up pretty good inside; let's put it here. Pretty good within the structure. These two tips may stick out and we can remove them later. Let's do it again here. This can come out here. We can cut it later like this, just cut those ends if we feel the need that way. So, the shape of a sailboat or... we always have several options, as long as it is simple but characteristic.
Let's say I agree with not putting the center line. First I'm going to draw the face mask. I'm going to draw the simplified opposite side of the face. I'm going to draw the simplified joy on the jaw line in front of the ear. I'm going to draw a simplified hairline. So, like a cut-out Halloween mask, I'm going to conceive it like this. In this case, this will be completely lost in those bangs. But that's okay, I need a shape to work with. I could go this far, but it would be nice to be able to canonize my proportions, especially at the beginning.
If I always draw the hairline, probably a little bit lower here, if I always draw the hairline, then I see a shape of the same proportion, more or less, the character of the model and not something that is radically changing because of a locker room accident . Then I can add my center line down. I'm looking at where the forehead meets the nose and where the lips meet the chin, anywhere in there. If I'm a little off, that's okay; I can adjust it later or develop it later. Then it won't be a problem. There's my simplified idea.
That's a face mask. That's not enough. We need to get the shape of the skull. I'm going to look for the shape of the skull without the fullness of the hair. Please note that I have a lot of room for error. I can be down here and feel good. It could reach your hair, do it well because the hair will cover it. Although I would like to be quite precise. Not because the skull matters in this case because it will be covered by hair, but because many times it will matter how well that neck fits into the construction.
So there is this idea of ​​the hourglass neck. Let's get rid of this little pinch. We'll save that for a later structural talk. There is that hourglass shape. I then place it on the ear at this point because it will help hide that binding transition between the face mask and the hair. It's going to show us how they fit together, and in this case, now if we go back and add our construction lines. Maybe we didn't make the center line. Let's make the center line. Now let's make the eyebrow line. Notice that the center line of the face and the brow line of the features are all on the front of our shape.
So if we continue with a cube idea. Oops, let me adjust that a bit. We put a bucket on his head. Notice that the eyebrow line follows the front, in this case the right side of the cube. And the ear, if they're fairly well aligned, as they are, follows a left contour, the left side of that cube. Notice that inclination. Also note that it is almost always better to ruin the tilt of that bucket by making it tilt too much. Because what is our real problem here? The real problem is to fight against this flat paper or flat canvas that we are on and give the idea, the illusion of a three-dimensional shape of tilt, points and dimensions facing each other.
So, if we know that we have to fight against that uniformity to achieve the illusion, to capture the idea, I prefer to exaggerate the idea a little to make it more exciting. If I'm making a comedy as a movie, as a story, I'd rather it be too funny than not funny enough. You can always go back later. But if it's not funny, it's difficult. It's hard to fix it later. So if you have a real flat drawing, it's difficult to convert it into a three-dimensional shape. But if its shape is too three-dimensional and too tilted, it's easier to correct.
Notice what is going to happen. When you pick up my... bring it here. We can take the hairline and let it be about the top of the tube. Then notice that the tubular idea starts to break down when we add the skull back. We don't have a good idea of ​​the recoil of the gesture. We don't have a good idea of ​​how the back of the skull ends up against the back of the face. But if we continue down, notice the consistency, and this is one of the powers of using simple constructed forms. Once you have that conception of the construction, the tilt of the bucket, that will carry over to all the features and affect all the features.
Notice how all the features follow that same sloping construction line on the front of our tube. Not the tip of the nose, but from nostril to nostril, from corner of the mouth to corner of the mouthpartially hiding from us. So the ear is the only companion, the only feature that is in that lateral plane. So he's doing this. Let's change that color. He's doing this right around the corner. Really important interesting stuff. It was done, let's do it one more time. It was done in a really simple stage, with a really simple conception. Let's do it.
Here those features are simply removed. They will eventually turn the corner. But for now I'm just eliminating them because they're complicated and I'm getting the simple but characteristic truth, not the complicated truth right now. There it is there. There's my face down gesture line which is very important. Then I draw this shape over that. Maybe that's more comfortable for me. Then I build this from behind. Or if I do that I might get confused and think that's my jawline. Put your ear in the wrong place. So instead I draw the face mask in front of the ear, that sideburn area.
In front of the ear, down the jaw and chin and then the simplified hairline here. I then draw the ear to show the dynamic transition between the two. Then I'll go back to the chin and draw the simplified neck. Let's make it really long so we can see it. That neck is going. I usually don't bother building the tube because the neck doesn't last long. It will fall on the shoulders in the way we will see. So there it is. What was simple can become much more complicated. I can refine that hairline as it zigzags down in front of the ear.
Thin the back of the hair. Add the hairstyle on top of the skull construction and build from there. This is Manet. You can see it with Manet, a kind of father of impressionism. He sort of paved the way from the more traditional looks of Delacroix and Ange and even Sargent and that group to impressionism, post-impressionism and all the wild things like Picasso that came after. He was kind of that transition point. Very important character who is often not seen much by realists, people who like realistic things. They like Sargent or Bouguereau or that kind of thing better.
But he's great because he keeps things simple. However, that constructed truth is still there. We can see the egg. You can see how relatively flat the representation is. If we analyze we would find that all the structures, the key structures, are still there. But he simplified it and flattened it. We'll leave it at that for now. It is a flat and simplified truth. The truth is heavily edited, but the key information is still there to be found. So we can see, let's do this, I guess. We can see that beautiful idea of ​​the egg. That doesn't work so well, does it?
Let's do that. That beautiful idea of ​​the egg is there, in there. Note again that when you draw the egg, you often reduce the skull, rather than drawing more of an elliptical egg. I insist on that because I make that mistake and I see that many other people make that mistake. Many students in class make that mistake. So there it is. Note that here we could finish the egg built on the chin or include that fold under the chin, that would be the digastric plane, that lower plane. You can do either or, like I did here, you can do both.
Pick up both. Here he is slightly bent over, slightly tilted and slightly on his back. It is not a perfect profile. When I try to get the position of any shape I'm building, I compare it to a grid, with a perfect vertical and a perfect horizontal. If I don't think about that perfect vertical and horizontal, I will tend to draw all my figures unless they are tremendously dramatic in a perfect vertical and horizontal. So if I hadn't looked at it, I probably would have drawn it like the Holbein, where it was very formal looking at me like that, a T that's perfectly upright.
This T wants to lean a little and wants to look away. So we're going to have the center line filling this, and we're going to have the construction lines rising slightly to the right. Since we don't have this dramatic position like we had with that little baby Rafael, we can clearly see the construction lines. I'm just looking from the corner of the mouth to the corner of the mouth. Some aim for the nostrils or wings of the nose in width. Maybe the outer corners of the eye and the arch of the eyebrow. The hairline does whatever it does, but you can see how we could go back for a moment here.
Find it here or maybe you won't see it here, but maybe we'll find it here or a lump in your hairline that we can trace. If we could see both ears, they would cross and so on. And then we would build the shape of the hair. When I make the shape of the hair I want to make it simple, but characteristic, so I give it these kinds of rounded, bun-like shapes, one on top of the other to make it characteristic. Maybe even a little of that. So the ear is already placed there. Notice why she is a woman; now the necklace hides it a little, but since she is a young woman, we notice, despite the costume, that her neck is a little thinner than her jaw and certainly the shape of her face.
Look even through the locker room, even through the interruptions, look at where we see our construction lines. So just find a convenient point for a shoulder line, and you can do that dropped triangle there and get that head and neck connectivity in the shoulder girdle, shoulder construction that will take us beautifully into the torso and beyond. Raphael again. He's fine. I like his drawings because he keeps things simple. He edits out all the dimple lines and frown lines. He keeps it simple, idealized and we can see those shapes more clearly. And since he is a Renaissance man, he chooses these round shapes.
You can see the egg shapes and the arm here, all these little egg shapes and throughout all the shapes there are egg shapes. Alright, this one has a real danger, and it's a danger of getting the balls somehow. We will see this explained more clearly when we get into a more solid construction. We will discover that the more built something is, the more architecture we want to put on it, the more dramatic the placement of the shapes, one shape superimposed on another or the shapes themselves in dramatic perspectives were well below their three quarters. back view.
So, closing things will be very useful for us. The problem with eggs is that they become so rounded that sometimes their position baffles us. And notice that the wrap here, the head wrap, looks like this. When we look at that and then make that face. We once again have that idea of ​​the skull falling that deceives us. It doesn't seem right. Notice that the ear is nice and low. Once again the idea of ​​the skull that deceives us falls to our minds. It doesn't seem right. Notice that the ear is nice and low, getting closer to the bottom of the face and away from the top.
That tells us that we are a little above this topic, maybe more or less. But I need to feel that skull, make sure I can get a skull, let's put it in there correctly. Remember, we need to have more than just a right angle. It should open a little. Now, when we get over this, let's turn it into a box. A little more dramatic position box. Note that this narrows this curve. The right angle construction begins to distort forming a pinch angle. Now the back of the skull rises a little and that combats it. But that position kind of reinforces that hardening of that angle, but we don't want to do it too much.
This is what I mean. Here is the construction line of the face. Here it is... you can see that with this little sketch here, the bulge here. There's the skull. Let me do it again in a dark line. That's what we're seeing there. Notice the difference now. Let me do it one more time. Face construction line. There is the skull in its correct position. He didn't screw up. What about that? So the ear sits here, that transition between the two. Note that this clashes a bit here. In reality, this digastric plane even feels like it's behind the ear and it is, but the jaw itself is always in front of the ear, so make sure you're aware of that.
You don't want to put the talking jaw back in here somehow. Again, that ear does a wonderful job for us, doesn't it? You can see that when we get closer to the front of the face it shows that we are moving away here, moving away. The face is turning. And coming down from the top of the head shows that we are slightly above that position. So the head wrap helps. Although it goes in its own direction, it still revolves around the perspective of that tubular idea, that idea of ​​being on top. We'll learn more about that again as we move into more sophisticated positions.
Here's that beautifully pulled back neck. We've got a little bit of that lower plane receding. Here would be the other side of the neck if we could see through our construction. Or the shoulder line is here going into deep space like this. Then we build on that. So we just have a basic idea of ​​that sunken triangle idea in deep perspective. Alright, here we have Tiepolo and we have a rear view and slightly below. Of course, in our posterior view the skull dominates. You can see that this growth pattern gives us an idea of ​​the back of the skull.
If we were to follow this along the center line of the back of the skull, the center line of the neck we would follow the spine. That takes us to the bottom. That spine becomes a wonderful center line to gauge that facing dimension, which direction it is turning. You could also see the ears. This ear is outside the contour of the constructed head. This ear is going to be inside the head built with the face that we have not made. So let's back up that for a second and do it again. Now we can see that we have the face gesture coming down like this.
The problem we have is that all those features are missing. It just feels like you've walked away from your document and have nothing to hold on to when you don't have those features. So here we have to work more carefully. What I'm going to do is feel the neck, and the neck; You can feel your own neck and you will find that the neck comes out just behind the ear. The actual muscle is called the sternocleidomastoid muscle. That's what creates that tubular neck shape from a front and back or three-quarter view. You go into the lateral view and then the sternocleidomastoid is inside the outline.
We will use it from there in different ways that we will see. But it doesn't create the outline. And here's our nice bent neck tube coming out of the ears. The face is out of it. We only see it from this side. We don't see it from this side. Then we have the construction line. The shoulder line here leans in this direction. When I see hunched shoulders like this, and they're hunched in part because he's a figure high above us, which is typical of Tiepolo because he did a lot of ceiling murals. I wanted to give the illusion that those figures were above us.
A lot of times we have that under the curvature like a tube. And then he would go ahead and draw a hunched line for the shoulders. Let me take that away so it's clear, a slouched line for the shoulders. Then there's the shrug muscle. Note that the shrug muscle is inside the constructed neck and that the neck is inside, i.e. on top. The shrug muscle is at the top of the neck built. The constructed neck is on top of the face and we can't see it here. But we arrived at this step. Let's do it here.
Muscle shrinkage is here. The neck is behind that. And the face is behind it. So we have this stack of forms disappearing. Very important from the rear view. Then the ears. This ear is inside the constructed contour. This ear is outside the constructed contour. That does most of the work. We have that hair pattern he added, but that's a secondary detail. The ears are really doing most of the work to show that we are in a rear view, not perfect, but a slight turn towards the left rear view. The other thing that works is the asymmetry of seeing a face here and no faces on this side.
Very complicated things, right? We have to stop and resolve that. Over time it becomes intuitive and you can follow it. But at first it is complicated. Making tracings and constructions like I'm doing here is a great way to work out those truths, to discover the nuances, the little things that you wouldn't think about if you didn't have to draw them, but that are crucial for our audience or laymen, our viewers, understand it when they see it. Let's stop there with our old masters. Then we'll be back with some drawing session exercises for you and I to participate in.
Then I'll see you in a moment. Next comes our timed poses section. I want you to go ahead and take your head off the reference we're giving you. It will be timed, but if you go a little overboard or finish a little faster, that's okay. What I want to do is see the basic construction of the head finished. Continue,Try it and see how it goes for yourself. Now it's my turn to work on the timed pose. So I'm going to go ahead and do my basic build based on the reference and we'll see how it goes.
Alright, I hope you made your own set of drawings. Now I'm going to go ahead and draw. Can you look at me. You can follow me and I'll give you my own tips and advice as we go. I should tell you my materials now. I'm just using a fountain pen. This turns out to be a Waterman Paris, sort of a mid to low range fountain pen and just a sepia brown ink. I'm also using Faber-Castell, and these are just an optimistic tone. Any type of range of browns. Turns out these are 9201-192, and it's a nice soft brown color, kind of an orangey brown.
Alright, now it's my turn. So I'm going to draw the biggest, simplest, most distinctive shape I can. I'm working between an inch and a half and two inches in actual size, whatever is on the screen. That's what it is for me. It can be reduced to about an inch. It can measure up to three inches. If it grows too much, it will take a long time to style it. You become too small. There are too many minutiae. Every little movement becomes a big problem on a large head, so the eyes can quickly get out of control.
Sometimes you want to map out exactly where features are or roughly where they are to get an idea of ​​whether it's working for you. Notice that I am drawing several marks for each mark. I make sure the head connects with the neck. You can even wear it to the shoulder line. And don't feel like you have to finish. Simply choose everything you need in the time you have. Okay, here we have a three-quarter view. Just for the hell of it, I'm going to start with the center line of the features and the line of the eyebrows.
And then build around it. I'm going to draw the face mask since it dominates the position of this head. But whatever order works for you is the right order. In this case I noticed that the ear is a little lower, more towards the eye line. Now I'm going to go in and refine the hairline to make sure it fits the face mask. Of course, while drawing you can stop it. Go back and do it a few times to fix it. But don't get any more details than this, just roughly the shapes you need. And I'll say, you know, I like what I'm doing.
I just want to clean that jaw. I'm going to cheat and steal five, ten, 20 more seconds. Nobody will ever know. You will not be demoted. The New Masters police will not show up at your door. Just go ahead and do that. But don't spend 20 minutes on it. Here we have that shape of a sailboat. I'm going to back up almost as far as it goes down or as far as it goes, anywhere there because your hairstyle will make the correction. It is not a perfect profile. I'm going to lean back on that center line a little bit.
I did a lot of work with the features there to get an idea of ​​how low I want to go with that face mask and how far back I want to go. Sometimes I even feel my eye socket, cheekbone, and sideburn area so I can get a clearer idea of ​​where that ear is. Feel that nice digastric plane that is crucial when it comes to giving volume to that face mask. Well, here we go. This is more of a perfect profile, but this time we've gone slightly to the other side, so we're going to have a slight recession of those frontal features, across the entire frontal plane of the face.
That means the ears can get a little closer. If I'm going to make a mistake, it's better to get a little closer. I can feel where the eyebrows and eyes are here, the nose, the mouth, just marking the information, without defining it, without analyzing it. I just position some of the small things to have more confidence in the big things. Sometimes I even put in a couple of loose lines like that and let the audience choose. Is that here? Is that here? Is that here? Is that here? And you will decide what is the best answer and get me out of trouble.
Sometimes that's the case, you can sleep as a couple. You don't want to do that everywhere or you're just compromising and not learning. But every once in a while you can make a couple of those little marks and let the audience help you. Now we're getting over our heads. That means the skull will dominate the face, so maybe go ahead and draw the shape of the skull. If there is a part in the center of the hairline, it would be here. The face will be shorter than normal. It's a foreshortening, so it literally shortens visually, but not really.
You won't be sure where it is. Then take your best guess. You build back up some of the secondary details, the hairline. Here is the ear. The ear is also shortened a little. Eyebrow line, eye line, nose, mouth, chin, neck. So we're not trying to make these pretty pictures. This time I'm going to start with a different procedure. We're just trying to get the important basic stuff, the big information, the big construction stuff. We are framing in the house. We are not going to decorate it. And sometimes, even at this stage, you will come up with really lovely little moments in the drawing.
That's great, but that's not the point. The point is to learn to see, learn to analyze, write down the key and important things, making decisions according to priorities. What has to be there instead of what would be fun to have there? What would be cool, neat or beautiful? Cool shows my age I guess. I shouldn't say ordered. Radiant. How is that? Or it should be fantastic. Alright. Sometimes you might finish a little early. That's fine too. You don't have to move on. But there are always things you can do, getting secondary forms after getting the primary forms.
Going back and reviewing those primary forms a second time. Maybe take it a little further than what's in the reference to make an aesthetic point or highlight a lovely feature, all that kind of stuff. Here's the profile again. Its going down. We will represent all this great figure. I'll draw it as if it were a flat profile and then go back over it and feel the idea built. Notice how I'm doing the eyebrow line this way. The chin line like this. I'm exaggerating them to include that in the box idea. And by doing something like this in a difficult position early on, you could spend the entire first minute getting half of this to where I am here.
Don't feel like you have to finish. Decisive tie. I will draw quickly to make clean and sharp movements. I will draw quickly to encourage myself to have the big ideas and ignore the small ones. I won't draw fast because I'm out of control and desperate to finish. Make sure you're drawing the speed that works for you, not the speed someone else is doing that you wish you could do. Okay, now we're up so the skull dominates and we're behind the head. And then the skull dominates even more, so we're going to show less of the face, and we're going to have the face receding into a foreshortened position here, more so that the ear is very, very close to the front of the face. .
It's better to be too close. And the ear descends. It is better to be too low. The eye socket. I'll make a little bump there because we can't see the eyes very well. There and the nose are all very high. And if you could see a center part of the hair, you could see where the hair gathers and pulls back and tends to fall there. Go ahead and pick that up. Let me briefly remark on this for a moment. See what would happen if I did the same thing and then did the nose and the eyelashes, and maybe you could see some lips there.
It will have a silhouette that may be very precise, like a shadow on the wall, but it will look flat because it will take the nose and the lips and whatever else, part of the eye or the eyebrow that you see, and it will take it from the frontal plane to here and it will take you to the side plane. It's going to kill that corner and just flatten it out. So we want to make sure that in our beginning built here, notice how I'm going to darken it here. Notice how the cheekbone, forehead, and eye socket collide, but create a continuous line.
Sometimes it breaks a little bit around the chin, that line, like that. It's okay to show it or not to show it. But then we want the nose and all the other features. In this case the lips are not shown. But if they were, the lips like a line behind and I actually break them, the bottom of the nose, the bottom of the lip, let's say. Here is the chin and here is the ear. In fact, I separate them from the line so that they remain like a ghost. I usually draw the bottom plane where a light source would be shown.
If we shaded this egg like that, the light would reach the top and shadow would occur at the bottom. I'm showing the dark side, the darker side that would be the most visible because it captures the dark shadow on this white paper. So I do my best to visually push it back, break it up, separate it, and keep it continuous throughout. Okay, more complete rear view. I'm going to draw the skull that I know is there and the ear. I always draw the front of the ear first so I know how close the ear is. When you're right behind that ear, I'll make a little double line.
You can take it to whatever you see of the rest of the ear or just keep it as a double line. That shows the thickness. Again, a corner from the back of the head to the side of the head that shows the ear. So pick that up. The cheekbone is very high here. This pulls down here, and the skull, if there's no hair or short hair, let's make it so it looks like it's just a skull with a face. It would look something like this. This last one I drew I actually drew part of it, I started with the shape of a skull and then quickly moved on to the shape of the hair.
In this one I made the skull shape mainly because it's good practice and I wanted to show it to you, but what I would have done in my own drawing is simply drawn in all the hair, making sure to leave a full mass of the skull. there and then picked up the bun. So I'm actually drawing the hairstyle. And that hairstyle that I often look for, let's do that, where the top becomes the back right there. You can see here how this speeds up and slows down here. That suggests that top and back. Any time we can do that, it will give it a little more volume.
He'll make sure he doesn't cut into that skull even a little bit. I hit him a little. So there you have your choice. But practice a little bit drawing the full skull through the break or the hat or the hairstyle and then build that fashion, that costume on top of that. Okay, now we're below, so this egg or capsule shape is going to shorten. And we will go over this carefully. We will do a whole section where we will discuss difficult perspectives. But as this rises and falls, we are below. All these distances, the eyebrows, the forehead and so on, are going to be shortened for us.
So you need to be a little more careful when placing things to make sure you respect that new look, especially how short the nose is underneath. We'll find out exactly why this is the case another time. Notice how uncomfortable and difficult it is. And this is a bit of an awkward view when you're underneath because of that awkward view and the difficult view that I'm drawing. This entire section is the bottom of the nose. I'm drawing the entire circle of the lips to feel the full volume of the lips. I will detail more details later as needed.
But I'm getting those full volumes so I can divide up this space and be clearer about where things end. Then I'll find the bottom of the chin and the rest where I'm more or less lying on. I'll give it a little bit of shade here. That's that digastric plane again. That ensures it doesn't look like a Halloween mask. Therefore, it is very important that whenever you look under the head you show part of that mass of the face that goes back to the neck, that lower plane of the face. Then there's that. I didn't have any chance to do the rest.
That would have been nice. In this case, I'm going to do it just to point out when you get underneath, look how low the ears go here. Notice especially on the bottom view of the face like this, you almost always end up drawing just the face mask and not the full skull with whatever hairstyle you're wearing. So make sure you add it back. Okay, three-quarter profile, and we're well below it again. If you think of it as a box or a tube, notice how this front side of it, which is our left side, rises and then moves forward.
This happens more slowly. This happens quickly but then changes direction. That first movement where all the features are except the ear goes upwards. You can't underestimate that, really. So it's better to make it much deeper than it really is than to make it less than it is. Here is the root of the nose here, the mouth here, the chin here. Note again that this is a difficult view, so I'm taking more time to work out the details. Always take that little extra to get some of the neck connection in there. Okay, in this case I'm going to draw the entire face mask like an egg.
It looks like an egg to me, so I'm going to do that. Then I'm going to lie on my center line to show that it's oriented. My eyebrow line showshow it tilts in and out of the page, and then the ear is way back somewhere. Nose, mouth, chin. Notice that even the chin is going in the same direction. The digastric plane collapses. You can even give it a little tone there to dial it in if you want, although we haven't talked about how to do that. You can code it. Well, that's my moment for that, but look what I did with the last few seconds.
I went back and touched on each of these areas or as many areas as I had time to make sure they all related to each other. Because otherwise you tend to draw this, and then you draw this, and then you draw this, and you draw this. You scrutinize, but you have never seen the whole thing until you get up and walk away from your room. So I want to maintain a process where I juggle all the balls at once. I put in my construction lines here, and then I go here to some other constructed shape, but then I compare that shape to those construction lines.
This to this, but this to this. These to this and this to that. This from here to this down here. There are relationships everywhere. You can find angles that you can capture. There are all kinds of ways to feel your relationships back and forth. So while making your art juggle constantly. Keep juggling. Go back, find a little mark, maybe add a little more detail, but just to bring you back to that place so you can compare that to something else here and this to something here, and you're constantly relating rhythmically. I always think of a conductor who brings together the brass section against the percussion and woodwinds and each instrument in each section plays with, against and through the others.
So there is this powerful composition. This dance of ideas, shapes, sounds. That line from eyebrow to ear is invaluable when you're trying to plot things out in a dynamic position. Finding the chin-to-jaw line behind the ear, the sideburn area, will help us feel that bottom. We will understand this better when we get into our second section on intermediate construction. Okay, here we are way below and behind so that the ear fills the front of the face and the top of the head. It is much better to exaggerate. In other words, push it too far up, too far forward.
You can use that hairline. It's always a great way to measure a sideburn up to your eyebrow and eye socket area. A great way to measure to make sure this distance is correct. There's that jaw full of it. Here is the shape of the skull. And here's the hairstyle that develops from that and adds to that. Well. Well, that's our lesson for the basic structure of the head. I hope it gave you some good tips to work with, some new information. I hope some of the assignments helped codify that information, make sure it works in practice and not just in theory.
As all of these lessons go, watching them more than once is a great idea. Come back to them again and again. This is difficult information. There are a lot of fine points there that you might not understand the first time. You can always use more practice, as we all can, of course. So go ahead and watch it a few times, but when you're ready move on to our next lesson. Our next lesson will be the construction of intermediate heads. See you there.

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