Introduction to drawing the head

Whenever you draw people in any detail, the point of interest will usually be the head – above all, the face. The face is our main way of telling people apart, but it is also a rich source of emotional expression. It is one of the most challenging subjects to try and draw, but we start with a couple of advantages. Firstly, artists have been finding ways to represent it for thousands of years, and we may benefit from the solutions they have found. And secondly, we have been reacting to faces from the day we were born.

Realist artists will not always have a model in front of them, of precisely the right type and willing to take whatever pose is needed, so we need to understand the head intimately so we can draw it from imagination. Ideally we achieve this by combining a command of technique with emotional expression, and, as always, sharp artistic judgement.

Technique

Through study and careful observation, we can learn to create a solid-looking head in any position we please. We begin with various ways of conceiving its basic form – a sphere, an egg, a block – as this is the easiest way to grasp its three-dimensionality and its relationship to the rest of the body. Then we need to develop our awareness of the structures and forms that together make up individual faces.

We need to know the human skull: how it looks from different angles, and how it relates to the surface features. We memorise the proportions, the planes, the muscles that govern facial expression, and the various specific characteristics of the eyes, noses, mouths and ears. By drawing a great many heads from various angles, we memorise the basic relationships and proportions so we may reproduce or violate those tendencies as we wish.

Humanity is remarkably diverse. Some artists may be able to meet their artistic needs by producing the same sort of character over and over again, but to be versatile and reproduce the variety we see before us, we need to observe the physical differences between male and female, young and old, lean and fat, (conventionally) ugly and beautiful, and so on, and know how to recreate these characteristics in our drawings.

Expression

A human head is more than a block or a skull or an accumulation of properties. It is the focal point of a complex, living being. Realist artists must study how the muscles and features change to create particular expressions. We have to judge which emotion or combination of emotions, or which angle of the head, best convey a work’s message, or capture a particular individual. It is easy to mystify this ‘seeking after the soul’ but it is essentially a question of observation and technique.

Try to do people justice. The heads and faces of human beings are alive and opinionated and expressive, and they demand a reaction from the rest of us. They are a central part of our daily social life. This is why, in realist art, being able to draw them well is so important.

What to do

If we have an internet connection we have access to an infinite supply of images of heads of every kind, either photographic or artistic, ranging even to the non-human (orcs, trolls and other anthropomorphic fantasy creatures are just variations on human beings). But if you really want to become expert in drawing the head, draw from life whenever you can.

Our goal is to keep studying until we can confidently draw, from our imagination, any sort of person we want, in any position we want. The next few posts will look at how to get there.