three hours of content. this is part of much bigger series, over 15 hours of content. You

can find the whole series at www.NewMastersAcademy.org.

I hope you'll check that out. But for now,

let's get to it and try and draw the head with basic construction and good confidence.

This is my basic head structure class. I’m going to show you the basic drawing structure

for the head. All the major planes, the major shapes, how the features set in terms of construction

lines. We’ll get that basic information down. We’ll do some assignments where you’ll

draw a little bit with those ideas. I’ll draw a little bit with those ideas. We’ll

look at the old masters and see how they did it. And then we’ll bring it all together

at the end and hopefully have a good, basic constructed understanding of the head by the

end of class. So I hope you join me.

Okay, as we start with our head now, I think of the head as the first gesture of the body.

We’re going to talk about the gesture and structure here. The head is the first gesture.

As we look at the art, as you look at me, you’re going to look here first and then

move down through. So if this is a book, chapter number one here. We have to get this right

and then everything follows from that. In fact, we can use the head as a yardstick to

measure the rest of the body to make sure it follows. So we want to get that head working,

and we’re going to make it out of the anatomy here. We have two major anatomical elements.

We’ve got the skull, the full round shape of the skull. And then we’ve got the mask

of the face that holds the features. Those two shapes have to work together, and then

we flow off that. All the detail we’ll talk about are going to work on these great structures,

so we’re going to start with these great structures.

So let me set this here, and we’ll get going.

Let’s talk about the proportions first. If we look at the shape of the skull, it’s

going to be an egg shape. Now, as we go through different characters, and we’ll save that

for a different chapter, but as we go through characters we’ll find that egg shape can

change in proportion. It can be a little more spherical. It can be a little more elongated.

We’re just going to do a basic egg shape here. It could be this. It could be this.

Anywhere in there. That’s going to be the skull from a profile like so. It’s going

to be crucial to get that egg right. I’ll show you why in a moment, because it’s going

to give us a good connection to our next problem. We’re going to draw that egg. Now if we

saw it from the front view or the back view that egg, just like looking at a breakfast

egg end on it would be a spherical shape, and it’ll be masked behind the features.

I’ll show you that in a moment. Or it will be the skull that we see, and we’ll see

that also momentarily.

Shape of the egg, that’s our first shape. The shape of the feature mask, mask of the

features. Now we can do all sorts of shapes. Let’s do a different shape here for a second.

I’m going to do an egg, and I’m going to do another egg. Now, the advantage of doing

another egg is it gives us kind of a roundness, and everything on the body has a certain softness,

roundness. Maybe you’ll draw in a little child that’s very round shaped. So it can

be seductive to choose that egg shape. The problem is that if we draw shapes that are

too curvilinear, too rounded they start to get out of whack.

We start to have trouble getting their position.

So if we can feel—notice coming back up here now we did the nice, round egg because

that was characteristic of what we saw. We made the face shape, I made the face shape

a little square, a little more boxy. By making that second shape, the mask shape different

in character from the first it distinguishes them, and also notice we have a sense of where

one ends and the other begins. So we can get a sense of where the face shape comes off

the skull shape. That’s going to allow the position to be set more easily. We’ll get

a quicker read of how that position is. Now we know immediately that we’re looking down

slightly with that head. Whereas in here sometimes it can be a little bit out of whack. What

if we have a character with a really full nose and a receding chin? We’re not sure

whether that would be right or that would be right. It can throw us. But if we’re

as little square, little flatter curve here, rounded curve here, it gives us a good sense

of positioning, and that’s what we want. Notice we can shortcut this. I can also take

this and kind of stylize it and simplify it and group the two shapes, skull and face mask,

into one bigger shape, a sailboat shape.

The advantage of this is it is much quicker, much simpler. The disadvantage is then we

have some work to do to get it back to that true skull shape. But quite often we’ll

have a hair style, say a woman with a ponytail bun that’ll cover that. So we have choices

there. We can make it a little simpler. We can make it a little bit more sophisticated.

We can keep it a little more open. We can keep it much more completed. You can choose

whichever you prefer. What I want, though, is something that’s simple enough for me

that I can get it down quickly and effectively so that I can get it down, have it work to

build off of, add other shapes to it, or make it simple yet characteristic so it not only

gets down quickly and fairly easily—nothing is easy in art, especially with the head.

But it’s characteristic of what I see before me, the character I want to draw, the thing

I want to take simply and refine. If it’s still characteristic of what I see, the refinement,

in this case, shaving off a corn or adding on some bumps and bulges, that kind of stuff,

as we’ll learn to do in a minute. That’s easier.

So whatever I choose in my construction I want to make sure it’s simple, simple enough

that it’s—I can get it down easily, characteristic of what I see so it reads well right off the

bad as a head that’s looking down as a woman with a certain hairstyle and characteristic

so I can refine it and turn it into an advanced finished rendering if I so choose. In other

words, I’m going to think like a sculptor. I’m going to start out with something simple,

and then I’ll refine it. I’ll add to it, take away from it, build it, and finish it.

Now, that’s the structural idea.

If you have or plan to go to any of my basic drawing classes, you’ll find that I have

two ideas, the structure and the gesture. The gesture, there is actually two gestures

to the head. There is the gesture of the skull going back this way. Let me switch colors

so you can see that. Gesture of the skull going back and the gesture of the face going

down. If we draw it again—you can see by 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 just a characteristic shape that’s useful, but a characteristic of the

two gestures of the skull going back.

One of the big mistakes people make is they’ll have the mask of the face pretty well set

however they’ve chosen to do it, but then they’ll draw the skull this way. They’ll

give it short shrift. It’ll be the wrong proportion. There is not enough there to fit

on a neck, for example. Look how skinny the neck gets when you get that skull wrongly

set. But also, we don’t get that drift back. We get a rolling curve up off the face. We

don’t feel that characteristic move back from face to skull. It starts to look a little

alien. Oftentimes, a hairstyle might fill out somehow and hide that drift backward,

but we still want to feel it.

The other thing that we want here, and notice I could make this much more boxy. Make much

more square choices rather than round choices so we have a continuum of choices there. Notice

what happens when I thrust that skull back with or without the hairstyle, and I’m really

conscious of that move back to the skull as opposed to that movement down for the face.

Then I’m going to respect the fact that the skull hits up high at the top of our construction.

That’s going to give me a much better fit, and we’ll go through this idea of connecting,

fitting to the next thing, the neck, in more detail. Notice that we come off the throat.

We come off the back of the neck. We put in a little bit of shoulder line so you can get

a sense of where we’d be going with that. Notice how high the skull and neck connect.

They connect very high. In fact, they connect—let’s do that so you can see what we’re after

and visualize more clearly. Notice that the head and neck—the skull and neck come together

about at the eyeline. In other words, if I check—I’m always my own best model. If

I feel where the bone of the skull meets the meat the neck, look at where that is right

there. If I throw that skull off and make it incorrect, make it too much of a ball,

a little ball that looks alien, or a really big ball like this, notice what happens here.

The neck fits too low.

If you have a real heroic guy, a superman character you can kind of get away with that

with the bull neck because the meat fills up and takes us up to that higher or at least

close to that higher level there, and we can get away with that. Actually the books, the

very fine books by Andrew Loomis, he uses a stylization. But he’s doing these heroic

fashion models, kind of fashion model meets Superman character, so he can get away with

that because he’s doing this heroic type. But if you’re doing the average person it’s

quite a different connection.

Alright, so again from the profile we keep that egg shape up high. That gives us the

sense of the movement going back. We build the face down. Notice I can do this. I can

do this. I can do this. All those choices. Simple, yet characteristic. As long as it’s

that, pick whichever you want or myriad others. So gesture going back, gesture going down.

This is the one that really counts. If you goof this up we have the problems that I suggested.

The reason I say this one really counts is this is the gesture that’s going to then

flow into the rest of the body as we move down. So it’s the face to the neck. The

neck to the torso. The torso to the hips, legs, all that good stuff. So we want to make

sure we’re thinking of this movement down. Now, let’s look at the proportions here.

If I were to take this whole structure notice it’s the mask of the face without the features,

without the nose sticking out, without the eye sockets digging in. It’s the skull without

the hairstyle. But if I were to take that bare-bones construction you’ll notice that

it creates a square that is just slightly longer in the face and slightly shorter in

the skull. Okay, so it’s not a perfect square. Let’s say this would be a perfect square.

It’s a little longer. If you’re going to screw up a little longer yet, and what

that does is just give a heroic chin. Even if you’re doing a woman it feels attractive.

If you get too long, which can happen, then it’s a problem. Just a little extra going

down. Then notice once you add hairstyle and features, nose pushing out, hairdo pushing

back, that can reverse, of course. But that gives you a sense of the construction.

Let’s just take this farther. If we break this whole thing in half, so equal part here

or there more or less. Again, if I’m going to screw up, always a little extra chin is

kind of the default ideal, at least in western art, in heroic art. But if we get that halfway

point, cut it in half, that is basically the eyeline. Let me put a little bit of the eyebrow

in there just so you can see it. Notice the eyeline where the upper lid meets the lower

lid. That’s a halfway point. Again, that’s about where the neck is, neck meets skull

somewhere in there. If you ended up down here or up here, anywhere in that range, you’re

still good. More than likely the hairstyle is going to cover it anyway. Or if it’s

a male with short hair, you know, the filling in of that more massive neck relatively more

massive neck is going to take care of it.

Without the hair skull to chin, cut it in half, you have the eyeline. eyeline to chin,

cut it in half and you’ve got the nose. It can be a little shorter, a little longer,

but that’s more or less the nose. When you say the nose not the tip of the nose, but

where the root of the nose meets the mouth shape in there. Cut it in half again, the

edge of the lower lip on average. Again, if I have a little too much chin that’s better

than a little too much upper lip here, upper plain, and two little chins. I want to keep

this a little shorter if I’m going to goof up, the chin a little fuller and bigger if

I’m going to goof up.

It’s always nice as an artist to know which way to screw up, where to error. If we generally

as we go down, if we make each thing a little bigger than it should have been—nose slightly

longer, chin slightly fuller, then the neck a little longer than it should have been,

the torso, the limbs, the legs all the way down. Adding that length it just looks more

statuesque or more heroic. That’s usually in western art especially, and western art

has kind of taken over the world aesthetically at this point. With lot of exceptions, but

just in general that’s going to be more idealized. That’s why women wear the high

heels, longer fingernails, low cut gown here, putting the hair up. It creates that length

that seems more beautiful, more idealized.

Let’s look at the front view then. Let me go back here. If we come across to the front

now I’m just going to do a sphere. Notice that the eyeline here—let me switch here