Draw the head from any angle: ball-and-jaw construction, the centre line, brow-nose-chin thirds, and how features shift under tilt and turn.
Most people can draw a passable face from the front. Two eyes halfway down, a nose, a mouth, done. Then the model turns thirty degrees or lifts their chin and the whole thing collapses — the far eye lands in the wrong place, the jaw floats, the skull goes flat like a paper mask with features painted on it. If that is where you are stuck, the problem is almost never your eye-drawing. It is that you are drawing a pattern instead of a solid .
Stop starting with an oval. An oval has no front, no side and no top, so it tells you nothing about where anything goes. Start with two masses.
The braincase is essentially a ball, flattened on both sides where the temples are. Draw the ball, then slice a flat plane off each side. Those side planes are the most useful marks on the whole construction: the moment the head turns, you read the angle off how much of each plane is showing. The skull is also widest above and behind the ears, not at the cheekbones — beginners draw the cranium too small and too narrow.
Hanging off the front-bottom of that ball is a second, narrower mass: the jaw and the face. Think of it as a wedge or shield attached under the front half of the cranium, ending at the chin. This ball-plus-jaw idea is old — it is the backbone of the Loomis approach and of most academic head construction, worth learning from the original sources if you want the full method. The consequence is what matters here: the face is a smaller, front-facing box bolted onto a larger, rounder container. The cheekbone and the corner of the jaw are the joins, and drawing them is what makes a head feel like it has a skull inside it.
Two construction lines do most of the work. The centre line runs vertically over the ball, down the forehead and through the nose, lips and chin. It is not straight on the page — it wraps a curved surface, so it bows toward whichever side is turned away. The brow line runs at right angles to it, wrapping the other way. Everything else is measured off those two.
For proportion, the classical approximation still earns its keep: hairline to brow, brow to base of nose, and base of nose to chin are roughly equal thirds. Treat it as a checking device, not a formula — the difference between a generic head and a portrait lives almost entirely in how a specific face deviates from that average.
Published 2026-07-23 on the Refimages blog.