5 minute heads · Face drawing practice
Head angles, one at a time. Almost every error on a face is a proportion you did not measure, and this is where you measure them.
What this drill trains
Head angles, one at a time, until the proportions survive being rotated. A face drawn front-on is mostly a memory test; the same face tilted up thirty degrees is a genuine measurement problem, because every horizontal you rely on has become a curve.
The measurement that carries everything is the eye line at the vertical middle of the head. Almost nobody believes it, because we read faces from the eyebrows down and quietly discount the skull above - and that single misplacement accounts for more failed portraits than any other error.
Repetition is the mechanism here rather than care. Six heads at two minutes teaches more than one head at twelve, because the thing being trained is a set of proportions becoming automatic, and automatic comes from frequency.
How to do it
- Draw the cranium as a ball and flatten both sides. The top two-thirds of a head is a sphere and drawing an egg instead leaves no room for the jaw.
- Drop the jaw to the chin and find the halfway line between the top of the skull and the bottom of the chin. Measure it - do not place it by eye.
- Put the brow, nose base and mouth in as three more horizontals, and curve all four with the tilt of the head. Drawing them flat is what makes a tilted head look like a flat one with features slid around.
- Divide the eye line into fifths. The eyes take the second and fourth, which leaves exactly one eye-width between them.
- Place the ears between the brow line and the base of the nose. This holds at every angle and is the fastest way to catch a head that is subtly wrong.
- Check the three widths - eye spacing, mouth width, jaw width - before adding any detail. Widths carry the likeness; heights carry the structure.
Why the references are drawings, not photographs
A photograph of a face gives you a specific person, and a specific person is a distraction while you are learning where a nose goes. It also hides the construction: the ball of the cranium is invisible under hair, and it is the thing you are supposed to be drawing first.
These references show the ball, the jaw, the centre line and the four horizontals, curved to the angle. The construction is the reference, which is exactly backwards from a photograph and exactly right for practice.
There is a second reason to draw rather than license: nobody's actual face is on this site. No model release, no likeness, no image of a real person to be uncomfortable about.
What we measure, and what the number means
Proportion, in four specific places: the eye line against the head height, the eye spacing, the mouth width against the pupils, and the ear placement against brow and nose. Those four catch nearly every failed head.
Likeness is not measured, and cannot honestly be - these are not portraits of anybody. Neither is expression, which is a judgement rather than a measurement.
On the tilted references we also check whether your horizontals curved. Drawing them flat is the specific failure those angles exist to expose, so it gets its own note rather than being buried in a proportion score.
Where it usually goes wrong
Eyes too high. The most common error in drawing by some distance, and it produces the alien look on its own.
Forehead too short. The other half of the same error - the forehead is about as tall as the nose is long.
Flat horizontals on a tilted head. If the head is looking up and the eye line is level, the drawing will read as wrong without anybody being able to say why.
Ears too low and too small. They sit between the brow and the base of the nose, and they are bigger than instinct suggests.
The lessons this drill helps with
The face lesson and each of its parts, which are worth doing separately before attempting a whole head.
How to draw a face · How to draw an eye · How to draw a nose · How to draw lips · How to draw a hand · How to draw a cat
Questions about drawing faces
- Where do the eyes go on a face?
- Exactly halfway down the head, measured from the top of the skull to the bottom of the chin. Measure it every time until it stops surprising you.
- Why does my face look like an alien?
- Eyes too high and forehead too short, almost always together. Fixing the halfway line fixes both at once.
- How do I draw a head at an angle?
- Curve the horizontals. Every line that was level on a front view bends with the tilt, and the centre line bends with it - that curvature is the angle.
- Is this the same as the face lesson?
- No. The lesson walks one head through fifteen steps; this is six heads at different angles on a timer. Do the lesson first, then use this to make it automatic.
- Can I use this to draw a specific person?
- Indirectly. This drills the proportions every head shares; likeness comes from the small deviations from those, and you cannot see a deviation until you know the baseline.
- Are these real people?
- No - they are constructions we drew, which means nobody's likeness is on the site and the ball, jaw and centre line are visible rather than hidden under hair.
Session lengths
- 2 minute heads The real session, and the default. Long enough that the correction starts happening inside the session instead of between them.
- 5 minute heads The real session, and the default. Long enough that the correction starts happening inside the session instead of between them.