How to draw the head from the front

The front view is the angle most people learn first, and it hides the most. Nothing turns away from you, so there's no overlap and no foreshortening to tell you where the forms are. What's left is a set of measurements. Get them right and the head looks solid even in outline; get them wrong and shading won't rescue it.

The order, in short:

1. Draw the cranium as a ball and hang the jaw below it.
2. Drop a straight center line and mark the halfway line for the eyes.
3. Divide the face into thirds at the brow and the base of the nose.
4. Hang the ears, usually from just above the eye line to just below the nose.
5. Compare the width of the skull with the face.
6. Add tone to the planes that turn away.

To draw the eyes, nose, mouth and ears on this frame, how to draw a face step by step takes them in order with a measured number for each.

Start with a ball and a jaw

From the front the head is taller than it is wide. Two thirds is the figure often quoted for the skull's width against the head's height, so we measured it on the ten plates in the front view reference. We took the skull at its widest above the ears, and the height from the top of the skull to the bottom of the chin. The skull came out about two thirds to nearly three quarters as wide as the head is tall, about seven tenths on a typical head. These are ten drawings in one style, so the numbers describe them, not every person; four of them tip slightly back, which nudges their ratio up a little.

The gaunt-planes and hard-plane heads are the narrowest, about two thirds as wide as tall, with the gaunt-planes head a little narrower. The soft-planes head is the widest, close to three quarters. So start at about seven tenths, and narrow it toward two thirds for a lean head like the gaunt-planes one. Draw the cranium as a ball at that width, then let the jaw hang below it so the whole shape narrows toward the chin.

Drop a vertical center line from the crown to the chin. In this view it's straight, and everything on the face is mirrored across it. Then draw a horizontal line across the middle.

Put the eyes halfway down

The eyes sit on that middle line, about halfway between the top of the skull and the bottom of the chin, a little above or below on these ten heads. Beginners often put them higher, because the forehead looks like empty space. Hair makes this worse, since it hides the top of the skull. Measure from the crown, not from the hairline.

Andrew Loomis builds the same view from a ball with a cross on it, and divides the face into three equal spaces from the hairline down. The Loomis method follows his steps on the plates.

The old rule puts one eye width between the eyes and five across the head. On these heads the gap is about one and a third eye widths, and the skull at its widest, just above the ears, holds about six: the two eyes, the gap between them, and about one and a third more on each side. Face width proportions measures both.

Divide the face into thirds

Below the hairline the face splits into three roughly equal parts: hairline to brow, brow to the base of the nose, and the base of the nose to the chin. The lowest third often runs a little longer, and it does on most of these plates. The mouth line sits about a third of the way from the base of the nose to the chin. Face proportions for drawing measures how far four of the heads move from these rules. The plates are drawn without hair, so the hairline is yours to place. How to draw a hairline shows the rule for placing it and how real hair departs from it.

Older rules fit the ears between the brow and the base of the nose. On these plates the ears run a little past the lines nearer the middle of the face: on a typical head the top sits about a quarter of a nose length (the distance from the eye line down to the base of the nose) above the eye line, and the lobe about a quarter below the base of the nose. The hard-plane and heavy-jaw heads carry the whole ear lower. How to draw ears from the front has the measurements; our own reread of the twenty ears for this guide landed close to them. From the front they're foreshortened: narrow, slightly flared shapes with part of the inner curl showing, not the full ear you see in profile.

Compare the skull and the face

From the front, these plates draw no edge of the face inside the ears, only the line of the skull behind them. The first height where the face has its own outline is lower, so we measured it at the corners of the mouth. There the face is narrower than the skull on all ten heads: about two thirds to seven eighths of the skull's width, about three quarters on a typical head.

Both widths vary. The gaunt-planes, hard-plane and heavy-jaw heads pair the three narrowest skulls with faces wider than most, so their faces come to about seven eighths of the skull's width. The full-lips head has the narrowest face of the ten, two thirds as wide as its skull. So when a front view looks off, compare the two widths before you move a feature.

We couldn't measure the cheekbones from the front, so judge them against the jaw by eye. The high-cheekbones head looks widest across the cheekbones and keeps a firm, fairly broad jaw below them. The heavy-jaw head holds its width almost all the way down to the jaw corners.

Find the planes with tone

A front view drawn only in outline looks like a mask, because every line is a contour and none of them describe the surface. On the tonal plates the sides of the skull and cheeks carry light hatching where they turn away, and the underside of the nose, the lower lip and the chin pick up shadow. A few of those value changes make a flat-on head read as round. The nose is where this matters most; the nose guide shows how it's drawn from the front and through the turn.

From the front the neck is narrower than the jaw, and its sides come down from under the ears rather than from the jaw corners.

Turn it a little

The front view is where the turn starts. Draw the same head at the slight three-quarter view, using the guide to that angle. The eye line, the brow and the base of the nose should stay at the same heights while the center line starts to curve. If a feature has to move up or down to make the turn, the front view was off.

The square-jaw head on this page is sold as Study Pack 07, with all sixteen angles of that face in pencil and tone.

This guide is one step in how to draw the head at any angle, which puts all the head guides in order.