Male and female differences

There are a number of differences between males and females. On average, men are about 15% bigger than women, and tend to be more robust, whereas women have rounder, more gracile forms. This series of articles is about drawing the head, so I’ll confine myself to that.

The observations here are generalisations. Artists have often followed ‘ideal’ standards designed to make men really ‘masculine’ and women really ‘feminine’ (e.g. in the American commercial art of the mid-20th century). In reality, people don’t fall neatly into two types. You will see ‘masculine’ features in women and vice versa. However if you’re trying to create a stronger impression of maleness or femaleness in your subject, these are the characteristics to work on.

Male and female heads in profile. Typically, men’s foreheads tend to slope more, whereas women’s are more vertical. The eyebrow ridge is heavier in the male, smoother in the female.

In general, the bone structure in men’s heads – the brow ridge, the jaw and the chin – are more prominent and angular. The woman’s bone structure is smoother and her face less blocky and more oval. A man’s features are larger and heavier, a woman’s smaller and more delicate.

A man’s eyebrows tend to be heavier, straighter and closer to the eyes. A woman’s eyebrows are thinner and arch upward, taking them further from the eyes.

In profile, the man’s wider, stronger neck is more vertical than the woman’s, which is longer and more graceful, with more of a forward slant.

When men get older their wrinkles tend to be deeper than those of women, who are finer-skinned with less prominent muscles. In the young, the sex differences are less well developed, but we will consider ageing separately.

Drawing hair

Drawing hair can be intimidating for beginners. It varies greatly in length, colour (sometimes artificial) and density, and there is endless variation in styling across time and cultures. And of course it consists of over 100,000 individual hairs, curling and fluffing off in random directions, which can seem a nightmare to draw.

Structure

The overall form of the hair is determined by the skull. When you draw the hair it’s important to be aware of the three-dimensional head beneath, otherwise the hair may look flat or extend wrongly into space. The hair clings to the skull as an additional volume with its own dimensions:

When we think of hair as a block it will also have its own planes:

Hair grows in particular areas in particular ways, known as hair growth patterns. It flows in set directions. Hair at the front of the head tends to flow forwards. At the temples and side it flows backward and/or downward. On the back of a head there is a whorl of hair radiating outwards, usually clockwise.

Long hair at rest will grow downwards and wrap around the shoulders.

Recession

Men’s hair often recedes as they age, initially moving back in two cut-away shapes on either side of the forehead. It may continue to recede, meeting up with a bald patch on the back of the head, a process known as male pattern baldness. It is less common in Black men.

Women’s hairlines usually don’t recede, but their hair does get thinner with age.

Texture and colour

Hair texture is partly defined by how thick the individual hairs are: they can be fine, medium or thick (coarse). We can also talk about texture in descriptive ways such thin, lank, wavy, curly, woolly etc.

Reducing human variety to a handful of categories is useful only up to a point, but speaking broadly, there are three types of hair based upon ethnicity. African Caribbean hair is very dark, effectively black, and tightly curled. Asian hair is dark and very straight. Caucasian (white European) hair can be straight, wavy or curly and ranges from pale blond to dark. Red hair is more unusual and tends to go with wavy or frizzy hair.

Here are a few common hair colours:

As we age, pigment loss leads to hair turning white, though this affects Europeans more than African Caribbeans.

Widow’s peak

A widow’s peak is a V-shaped point in the middle of the hairline. It is an inherited trait that can appear in both men and women.

There are varying degrees of the peak. People with no widow’s peak have a hairline that runs straight across.

Drawing the hair

It’s tempting to be distracted by the mass of individual strands, but you should begin by capturing the general shape of the hair as a whole. Sketch in the volume of the hair, including its main forms and perhaps also the major plane changes.

Hair can be trim and neat, but it can also be random and messy. You don’t need to reproduce every last twist, curl and strand in front of you. While capturing the general feel of the mass of the hair, consider imposing a simplified sense of design and clarity where appropriate.

Locks

Strands of hair tend to group together into locks. As always, we can make complexity less intimidating by simplifying it, starting with the basic forms and gradually building up towards the details. Below is an example, though of course every lock won’t look like this. I drew these digitally but the general approach should suit any media:

1. Draw in the locks as simple shapes

They won’t look much like hair at first, but you’re trying to capture the basic forms. You may find sub-groups of locks within larger forms. Locks tend to taper, and for short hair it is effective to use a host of short, V-shaped locks.

2. Reduce the lock to a simple pattern of light, half-tone and shadow

Apply tone in the same way as to any other form. We discussed this briefly in a previous post. Think about the direction of your light source(s) and how the light affects the underlying form, i.e. the head. The surfaces facing the source will be light, those that turn away from it will be dark. Begin with broad areas of light and dark and then start to render more carefully.

3. Draw strands and break up the rigidity of the form

Avoid filling the highlights with too many details, as this can darken them and confuse the lighting; similarly, you won’t be able to see as much detail in the shadows. This means that most of your textural work will be in the half-tone areas.

Curls

Think of curly hair as a mass of curly locks, each one basically a cylinder with its own volume. The lock is like a ribbon that’s been wrapped around the cylinder to curl it, then left to hang free. Apply tone as you would to a cylinder.

Now put them together

When we put many locks together with the necessary variation, we can draw very convincing hair. Think of a mass of locks as a mass of ribbons. It helps the eye if the highlights and shadows have a flow or pattern to them. Don’t forget the forms underneath: individual locks will cast shadows upon locks below them. We should also employ elegant variation to keep the hair from looking mechanical, so don’t make all the highlights and shadows the same size and intensity.

An artist should be prepared to alter what he or she sees in the interest of good design. If your subject’s hair is bit confusing, consider changing the arrangement of locks and the pattern of light and shadow to clarify what is going on.

Tips on drawing hair

If you’re drawing the hair in any detail, you need to be cautious drawing the hairline, as it isn’t really a line, but a transition from sparse hair to copious hair. If you make the hairline too hard-edged, the person’s hair can resemble a plastic cap, like Lego. The same goes for facial hair: a sudden, thick and dark edge can make your subject look like he’s wearing a fake beard from a joke shop.

The same goes for hair’s outside edge, which should not have too hard an outline. Some hairstyles are extremely fluffy or frizzy, with loose strands curling all over the place. Even with tightly controlled or gelled hair, there will be loose strands and contour variations that break up the outline.

There are many thousands of hair strands so don’t even think of trying to draw every one! Instead, create the impression of thousands of strands.

When you’re drawing locks of hair, especially long ones, draw with firm, confident strokes, getting lighter at the tip. You will get nice, sweeping lines if you draw with your arm, i.e. from the shoulder not from the wrist.

It is a good rule of thumb, whatever you’re drawing, to make your linework softer and thinner in highlighted areas and heavier in the shadow areas, to make the line more expressive in communicating light and form.

When creating texture, it can be effective to use a combination of hard and soft media. That could mean soft and hard pencils, or in Photoshop a mix of large, soft bushes with small, hard-edged brushes. Use the softer medium to block in the basic tones and capture the sense of stray strands and fluffiness, then harder media to draw particular strands and details on top.

Facial hair

It’s mostly men who have noticeable facial hair. Women’s faces are covered in hair too, only it’s much lighter and downier than men’s, so we tend not to notice it. Beards and moustaches on women are very rare but some women have a discernible fuzz especially around the upper lip, so observe carefully.

Facial hair tends to flow from the centre line of the face radially outwards. Draw facial hair flowing in the direction the hair grows, with strokes matching the length of beard growth.

Beneath the lower lip, beard growth is thin on either side roughly where the pillars of the mouth are, whereas the centre is much fuller.

A very short beard conforms closely to the structure of the face, though its bristles may break up the facial outline. For a full beard, think of it as a volume with its own dimensions and its own front, side and bottom planes.

For stubble, if you’re working in Photoshop an easy solution is to use a custom brush. Paint a few random dots on a small canvas and then go to Edit > Define Brush Preset to save the pattern as a new brush in your brush library. Then you can easily block in the stubble. You can edit settings like Scattering, Size, and Opacity to get it how you want.

Painting hair step by step

Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to paint a realistic head of hair. It is written from the perspective of someone working digitally in Photoshop, but the process should be useful to artists working in other media.

A highly-worked hair painting can look awe-inspiring and intimidating to a beginner. Hopefully this tutorial will demystify the process and show that it’s really only a matter of technique and application. 

Create a custom hair brush

Before we start, let’s create a custom brush which will make hair much easier for you to paint. You can still get good results without one, but for a beginner it should help you to achieve a convincing effect.

Creating a Photoshop brush is easy. Make a new canvas about 400 x 400 pixels, then paint some black dots of varying size. Keep away from the edges. If you make all the spots identical you will end up with a really boring brush, so vary the sizes, shapes and opacity. This will make the brush both more interesting and more realistic, as the effect will more closely resemble real hair. It might look a bit like the example below. But make your own, don’t just download mine.

Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset and give it a name. Now, if you go to the Brushes palette (press F5) you can see it there. The next thing is to make some tweaks. In the Brush Tip Shape menu, tick Smoothing and Transfer and set the Spacing to 1–5%. This turns your dots into smooth lines, allowing you to paint hair-like strands. You can use the Rotate function to find the angle that works best.

When you’re satisfied, save your brush by clicking the ‘Create New Brush’ symbol at the bottom of the palette.

Some digital artists go crazy with custom brushes, which is fine I suppose, but serious artists shouldn’t rely on a brush to do the work for them. The standard hard and soft brushes, along with this new hair brush, are all we need to paint hair.

1. Canvas

Create a new canvas and fill it with a neutral colour as a base. We will paint the flesh tones on extra layers on top.

2. Sketch the basic volumes and flow

Create a separate layer and use a small, hard brush to sketch in the face. I won’t be painting the face in this tutorial, but will sketch it in for context. Draw the broad outline of the hair, remembering to give it its own volume. You may want to indicate some major plane changes, though I've not felt the need here with the straight-on view.

Then observe and draw the main locks of hair, simplifying where you think necessary.

3. Colour blocking

Choose a base colour for the hair and paint in the basic shapes. Note in our example how the hair is flowing around her head. Try to get the major forms correct early on – later in the process it gets harder to fix mistakes.

Beginners should bear in mind that details are harder to see on black hair, making it less suitable for practicing.

You can use a soft brush for this stage, leaving a smudgy outline to suggest the soft wispiness of hair. We’ll add more precision later. You may think it sensible to have different sections of the hair on separate layers – it depends on the hairstyle.

4. Define the lights and shadows

With the base ready, we now define the forms using light and shadow. Create a new layer (you can merge this into the other hair layer later if you want). For this stage, use your custom hair brush.

Pick a darker colour and paint in the shadow areas, then pick a lighter colour and paint the highlights. Paint broad strands, following the way the hair flows around the head.

5. Intensify the lights and darks

Add an extra layer of more intense lights and darks. I’ve ditched the sketch layer at this point, except for leaving the face in for context.

6. Use more colours

The hair is taking shape. We should give the hair some additional colours to make it livelier and more realistic. With a low opacity brush, scribble in some additional streaks – I’ve added a few touches of yellow and red. Best to do this on a new layer, and use an eraser to amend the effect. Once you’re satisfied you can flatten it down. I have kept mine subtle.

Consider adding subtle traces of the background colour to the hair, and painting some of the background colour over the edges of the hair to blend the two elements together. This helps connect the hair to the background, and suggests the reflection of colour from the sitter’s environment.

7. Paint smaller strands

It’s time to define the hair more precisely. With a very small brush and using quick, confident strokes on a new layer, add lots of thin strands using the colours we’ve established.

You want to create the impression of a mass of strands without having to paint every single one. Some digital artists, especially, seem to get obsessed with painting every detail. There’s really no need, and unless you’re aesthetically committed to hyper-realism it detracts from the work in my opinion. Even my own painting here goes way beyond the level of detail considered necessary by great portraitists like Sargent for example. Part of being a good artist is knowing what to emphasise. You want the viewer to admire the emotional impact of the portrait, not be distracted by pointlessly spectacular skills.

Concentrate the detail in the medium-lit areas, while allowing highlights to stay bright and letting shadows stay dark. Keep the strands in highlight areas very thin. Go back with an eraser to make adjustments.

Use the strands to break up the locks you’ve blocked in. With a low opacity brush, add strands below the main hair layer, to build up a convincingly wispy, fluffy edge.

Every hairstyle has its own level of tidiness, or lack of it, but don’t be too neat with these strands. Hairs go all over the place, so let them shoot off in their own directions.

8. Final details

The painting is coming on nicely now. Use tools like Levels and Hue/Saturation to adjust the colours and intensities. Zoom in to the image and use a small brush to add more individual hairs, working your way around the whole head.

Break up any chunks of colour or hard edges that catch the eye in the wrong way, and add some variation in direction and movement on any locks that seem too uniform. You may want to add some new, small locks on top for realistic variation.

Use a dark colour to add an extra level of shadow in key areas, such as where locks of hair overlap others. Then use a light colour to touch up the highlights.

Artists remove as well as add. Use an eraser to remove some of the body of the locks of hair, i.e. using space to divide strands and heighten the realism.

On a portrait you should darken the skin areas cast into shadow under the hair. This will look more natural, and less like the hair is simply pasted onto the head. As I’m only painting the hair itself I’ve skipped that step.

My final hair study. Click to enlarge.

What to do

A good exercise is to sketch a head and practice drawing different hairstyles on it. You don’t have to spend very long on each one, just get used to reproducing the flow and forms. Here are a couple of sets I did:

Obviously, gendered hairstyles are merely conventional. There’s nothing to stop males having ‘feminine’ styles and vice versa. The only limit on a person’s hairstyle is what their hair will physically allow them to do with it – sub-Saharan Africans can’t naturally have straight hair, and hardly any women are able to grow a beard – but even then there is the possibility of artificial hair such as wigs or extensions.

This is only a handful of examples. I could do hundreds more. The variety of possible hairstyles over eras and cultures, especially when you include coloured dyes, accessories such as hair clips, and so on, is effectively infinite.

The other thing you can do is obvious enough. Get some source material, and draw lots of heads of hair.

Tone on the head

To add tone to the head we need to know about drawing light. That’s a topic in itself, but here is a quick introduction.

Shine a lamp on an object and you will see broadly two areas: those hit by the light and those cast into shadow. In principle, areas directly facing the light will be the lightest, and areas facing directly away will be the darkest. Between the two extremes you will see a range of mid-tones (or half-tones), depending on how much the the surface turns from the light. The darkest part of these tones is known as the core shadow. In the shadow areas you will see some reflected light, which is light that bounces back into the shadow areas from the object’s surroundings.

The drawing below shows heads in front, side and three-quarter views, rendered into tone. On the left we show a simplified model on which the pattern of tone is easiest to read – an egg shape and cylinder representing the head and neck. On the right we show a more developed head.

The egg is lit from the left, giving us a gradation of tone from well-lit to half-tone to shadow. There is reflected light on the right-hand edge. On the head, the tones are essentially the same. Of course a head is harder to shade than a smooth egg or cylinder. It is a complex form, with ins and outs that catch or impede the light, such as the nose and the recess of the eye sockets, and the nose and chin that cast shadows below.

Planes on the head

In an earlier post we talked about how you can break the surface of an object down to planes. These reduce the form to a series of flat increments. They can also reduce the light to increments of tone. Each plane is a flat surface representing a single tonal value.

When you’re drawing a head, use the planes to help you think about how the light would strike flat surfaces and the gradations of light, half-tone and shadow.

Planes mark changes of direction taken by a surface. We can indicate those changes of direction using the directions of our brush or pencil strokes:

You probably won’t want to leave your head as a purely planar drawing, but simplifying our subjects to its basic forms helps us to apply light and tone. Once we understand the basic patterns, we can break down the planes to create a more realistic drawing. However, the planes are not just there to be scrubbed out afterwards: they should inform every step, and our awareness of them will persist into the finished drawing, whatever its degree of finish.

Shading the head

Here is a step-by-step guide to shading a head. The golden rule is to begin with the whole, and the big issues, before working down to the details. We’re talking about tonal values so I’m keeping this black and white to make them clear. It is written from the perspective of a digital artist painting in Photoshop, but the process should be useful to artists working in other media.

1. Sketch

Sketch out your head. Mark the major planes as these will be useful when you start adding values. You will need to decide upon your light source too. I’m going to stick to the standard three-point lighting described in the previous post. The direction of the main light source is marked with an arrow.

2. Basic tones

Add your basic flesh tone and block in the main shadow areas.

3. Add the next layer of shade

Add your darkest values including the core shadow.

4. Reflected light

Include some reflected light on the far side of the head.

5. Light

Add the light areas. Here I’ve left the sketch layer in, but you can delete it as soon as it is no longer helpful.

6. Blending

Blend everything together. Add any final details, including extra touches of extreme light and dark where needed, such as eye highlights.

(I have compiled these steps together onto a single sheet here.)

Tips

When you model the tone on a head, start simple, and try to keep the pattern of lights and darks clear. Don’t overwork the lights in the shadow areas, and vice versa. Clarity of form is more important than slavishly reproducing every feature you see in front of you, and a real subject may be affected by more light sources than the artist wants. If there is light or shadow that confuses the forms, amend reality in the name of clarity.

Unless you are going for a particular effect, avoid a very strong light source that blasts one part of the head and throws the other into intense shadows.

Lighting the head

The topic of light deserves to be studied in full, but until I get round to that, let’s take a look at light as it affects drawing the head.

Without light, there is only pitch blackness – and visual art is impossible! We see a head, or any object, only because it is hit by light. The resulting pattern of light and shadow gives us a sense of a head’s plastic, three-dimensional form, so it is very important to consider the direction, quality and strength of the light source. Subjects in real life are often affected by multiple, complex light sources, but the simplest lighting is to use a single source, such as a lamp or sunlight. (Natural light is changeable, so if you like your light constant and under your control, keep it human-made and keep it indoors.)

Direction of light

Changing the direction of the light source produces different effects upon the head. Let’s look at the main options.

Front lighting

The light is directed straight into the subject’s face. This is the simplest form of lighting, but when the head is seen straight on it can look flat because of the thin shadows and lack of contrast.

Back lighting

The light is directed straight at the back of the subject’s head, creating a halo-like bright edge and throwing the face into dark shadow. This makes the features hard to see, so it’s poorly suited to normal portraiture.

Side lighting

In these two illustrations the light is directed to the left- and to right-hand side of the head. This approach tends to split the head into contrasting light and dark halves. This is too dramatic for most portraits, as the features in the dark half are obscured, but an artist may like the effect for some pictures. You can vary the tones inside the light and dark halves without compromising the boldness of the pattern.

Back and side lighting

The light is directed from behind the subject but from the side, not directly behind. In this example, the light is from the back left. Creates a relatively small light area and throws the face into shadow.

Lighting from below

The light is directed up towards the head from below (underlighting). The effect is highly dramatic, and it distorts the features, making it popular for horror or melodrama. A light source from below is rare in nature – the effect could be caused by a fire or a laptop monitor.

Lighting from above

The light is directed down towards the head, creating dark shadows under the eyebrows, nose and chin. You might see an effect a bit like this outdoors when a bright sun is directly overhead.

Lighting from above and to the side

The light source here is directed slightly to the side and slightly from above. This is the most common lighting used in portraiture, as it has a balance of lights and darks that nicely reveal the forms of the face without distorting or confusing the features.

(I’ve put these illustrations together as a single sheet here.)

Studio lighting

In the illustrations above, we talk about one main light source. But there is light inside the shadow areas too thanks to other, weaker light sources. In fact, the industry standard for lighting a subject in a studio, known as ‘three-point lighting’, uses three main light sources: main (or key) light, fill light and back light. The purpose is to place the lights around the subject to illuminate it most effectively:

The key light is the main source that shines directly on the subject. It’s commonly set up at an angle to the subject to avoid the flattening effect of straight-on light, and is usually the hardest, brightest light of the setup. If you’re outdoors, it might be the sun; if indoors, it could be a studio spotlight.

The key light casts shadows, so from the other direction we use a fill light. This tends to be weaker or softer than the key light and evens up the overall distribution of light by making the shadow areas less intense. The fill light can be provided by a lamp, but artists often prefer to use reflected light, such as a card or curtain that bounces light back onto the subject more subtly than a lamp. Adding fill light brings the scene closer to the diffuse light of the outdoors and so helps make a picture look more natural; a weak fill light will make the key light more dramatic.

The back light (also known as edge light or rim light) is optional. Shone from behind, it creates a bright outline along the edge of the subject, either straight on or to one side, separating him or her from the background. This should be subtle, so it doesn’t disturb the other two light sources or the range of tones that clarify the forms. It can be effective to use a different colour to the main light: for example if the main light is warm, e.g. yellowish or orange, then the back light could be cool, e.g. blue. If you only use back light, the result is a mysterious-looking subject, seen in silhouette.

I’m not asking painters to become photographers. But we need to understand how lighting works, especially when painting a head from imagination, because light is so important to achieving a sense of realism.

Tips

• People tend to focus on the most brightly-lit part of a scene. 
• Similarly, too much light in unimportant parts of a picture can be distracting. 
• To create drama, use a strong light that throws dark shadows. 
• To flatter your subject, use a soft light that doesn’t expose their flaws.

Planes of the head

Artists often like to reduce organic forms to something simpler, to make them easier to grasp, and reducing the complex, rounded surfaces of the human body to a relatively small number of planes can greatly clarify its relationship to space and to light. Similarly, when we apply light to a figure, a strong light will make the patterns of light and dark clearer than a diffuse one. For realist artists at least, the important thing is understanding what happens in nature so that we can reproduce it.

A plane is a flat surface. Each change of direction creates a new plane, and planes in combination make up the surface of a form. A cube has six sides, i.e. six planes. An object like a nose or an ear, or an entire human being, is not made of flat surfaces, but a curved form can be built up using flat planes if we apply a series of increasingly small ones. Glenn Vilppu likens it to “starting a sculpture with a square block of stone and progressively removing corners until the desired forms emerge out of the surfaces”. Sketching the planes is a good way to establish a head’s general form before you start worrying about the complexities of the features.

Finding planes on the human head

We need to identify the major planes: reducing the head to its most basic pattern of surfaces. There are various legitimate ways of interpreting the planes, and we shouldn’t get hung up on which is ‘correct’. The model below is not meant to be definitive.

Study these planes. If you like, find other interpretations of the planes of the head and study those too. (For example, the artist James Gurney has a couple of lovely examples on his blog.) This is a generic model but in reality, every head has its own individual planes.

We first introduced the head as a sphere, later as an egg. In reality it is a combination of roundness and squareness. An artist can emphasise the smoothness and soft roundness of a head, or the chiselled, geometric squareness of a head, or find a balance incorporating both. The path you take depends on your artistic intentions. The middle path is to soften the planes enough to create realistic flesh while squaring them off in key places to preserve some draughtsmanlike solidity and character.

You may wish to place less emphasis on angular planes when drawing women, as they tend to have softer contours than men.

Your next step is to draw a series of heads with the planes indicated, at various angles. For each head, use the divided ball and plane method to plan it out, then sketch the features and planes together. One way to make it easier is to trace over photos, which is a perfectly good way to learn. You don’t have to limit yourself to the same planes as my diagram above: try and spot the particular planes of the head in front of you.

Using planes

Why approach the head this way? Because you can understand forms better when you imagine them in simpler terms. When you’re drawing a portrait, planes serve as an analytical basis for rendering the head in light and shadow. You can then gradually break down the hard edges and blend things together. It’s much better to get your basic construction and lighting right at the beginning than to spend hours on something that might turn out to be wrong.

Planes also start you thinking about perspective. I won’t discuss perspective right now, but in realist art not only does every object have to be three-dimensional, it has to occupy a three-dimensional space, even when you don’t draw that space explicitly. A head is seen at an angle, at an eye level and relates to a horizon.

Once you understand planes, your knowledge will start to appear in your drawings, giving your heads further three-dimensionality, solidity and character.

Using maquettes

It’s easy for someone to say “draw the planes on the head at various angles”, but it’s not so easy to do when you’re a beginner. If you find imagining the planes difficult, you could try using a maquette or model, either bought or one you’ve made yourself. Such maquettes, by their nature as actual three-dimensional objects, force you to resolve any uncertainties about what planes are needed and how they fit together. In a drawing you can fudge the geometry, in a model you can’t.

If you point a lamp at the head and move it around, you can see how the light falls: planes hit directly by the light will be well-lit, planes that turn away will be in degrees of half-tone, and planes facing directly away from the light will be the darkest.

A readymade head you can buy online is the ‘planes of the head’ sculpture by John Asaro, whose purpose is to train students and artists. The planes on either side of the head are shown with different degrees of detail.

Images from a series of photos of the Asaro head available on one of the Polycount.com forums. 

I haven’t used this or any other maquette myself so I can’t recommend it and won’t say much more, except that using a physical model will help give you a much clearer sense of the three-dimensionality of your drawings. What artists generally do is create an abstract model of the human head or body in their imaginations, which they refer back to again and again, manipulating it to match the individual they’re drawing. Remember, when you draw you are describing form. By getting to know a three-dimensional object intimately – regular life drawing works the same way – you are helping to create a mental model that will make your sense of form stronger.

The head in profile

The profile view of the head is the easiest to draw, as there are no awkward angles and no perspective. We have already touched upon aspects of this topic but here is our proportions diagram again as it applies to just the profile:

This clarifies the placement of the features in relation to one another.

Form

We can think of the profile as series of forms projecting out and projecting in.

Each individual, of course, has their own pattern. This is the basis of traditional silhouette art, like this one of (probably) Jane Austen from the early 19th century:

The lips tend to sit on a backward slope from the tip of the nose to the top of the chin:

Like any drawing of the head, a profile reveals the shape of the skull beneath. The hair reveals the general outline of the skull – obviously on a bald person this shape is unconcealed. We can see the superciliary arch or eyebrow ridge as a projection above the eyes; the recess of the eyes betrays the eye sockets. Assuming we are drawing more than just the silhouette, we can sometimes perceive the zygomatic bone as a prominence on the cheek, causing a slight shadow beneath. (We refer to this as having ‘high cheekbones’.)

The art of the tilt

Artists often avoid a straight-on profile by slightly turning the head. Robert Beverly Hale nicely suggested it was “for the same reason that a skillful pianist loves to play a difficult passage”. On a human level, we can convey a person’s personality easier if we have more of the face available to work with. But Hale understands that as artists, we partly approach a human subject as a form that needs to be explained. For example:

...The form may be better brought out in a tipped profile for various subtle reasons. One of them is that in a tipped profile you can show the curve of the line where the lips meet, as this line curves around the teeth. In a level profile, this line becomes straight and a straight line can scarcely reveal curving form.
(Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters, 1964)

Look at this drawing by Charles Bargue:

At first glance this seems to be a profile view, and broadly speaking it is. But when we look carefully, we realise we can see a tiny bit of the far eyebrow and eyelash, and a telltale V-dip in the top lip followed by a sliver of the lip continuing beyond the middle line of the face. These would not be visible in a straight-on profile view.

Therefore when we draw a head in profile, we must establish more than merely the proportions. We must also choose our tilt and perspective. The profile could be straight on or have a tilt – if the latter we must choose the axis of the tilt. The head could be simply turned on the vertical axis, towards or away from the viewer, or there could also be a turn on the horizontal axis, i.e. seeing the head from above or below.

To wrap up, here is a head in profile that I painted: