How to draw the head from above

A head seen from above is the view of someone sitting while you stand, or a face bent over a desk. The features are the ones you already draw at eye level, but they line up differently, and most of the changes run in the opposite direction from a head seen from below. The quickest way to learn them is to put the same head at the same turn side by side, once from level and once from above.

The plates here are from our head from above reference: two study heads seen from 20 degrees above, set beside their level views.

From the front, the ears rise against the features

On the level plate, the ear runs from about the eye line to just below the base of the nose. From 20 degrees above, the face tips away from you and the ear stays on the side of the skull, so it appears higher against the features. On the plate above, the top of the ear is above the brow, and its lower end sits about a third of the way down from the eye to the base of the nose.

This is the first thing to check on a high front view. If your ears still line up with the eyes and the nose, the face reads as level however much you shrink the chin. In profile the ear moves the other way, as the section on profiles below shows.

The construction lines curve down

The brow line, the eye line and the line under the nose are no longer straight across. Seen from above, they curve like a smile: the middle of each line drops and the ends rise toward the ears, which is the same change that raised the ears in the front view. Draw them as curves and keep them parallel to each other. From below they bend the other way, so the direction of the curve is the quickest way to tell which way a head is tipped.

The skull grows and the lower face shortens

Looking down, you see more of the top of the head. The cranium takes up more of the drawing and the forehead looks taller, while everything below the nose gets shorter. On the front plates the distance from the base of the nose to the chin is about four fifths of what it is at level. How to draw a face looking down measures how far each feature moves.

Draw the cranium first and give it the extra room. Then fit the features into the lower part of the head, measuring each one against the curved lines rather than against the level spacing you remember.

The nose lengthens and the neck hides

The underside of the nose turns away from you, so the nostrils mostly disappear and the nose looks longer. The jaw now covers most of the neck: on the plates only a short band of neck shows below the jawline, where the head from below shows a long throat.

Our nose guide, eye guide and mouth guide each end with a section on seeing the feature from above.

In profile and three-quarter

The cranium stays large as the head turns, but the ear behaves differently in profile.

Compare it with the level profile on the heavy-jaw head's page. At level, the top of the ear sits at the eye and its lower end at the mouth. From above, the face tips forward while the ear stays put, so against the features the ear drops: its top is between the eye and the base of the nose, and its lower end is below the mouth. The outline of the face hardly changes, which is why a high profile is easy to draw as a level one by mistake. Place the ear low and show more of the top of the skull, and the angle reads.

In three-quarter view the top of the ear still rises above the eye, as it does from the front. Measured on these plates, the face under the nose keeps a little over four fifths and nine tenths of its level length on the two heads at 45 degrees, about nine tenths at 67.5 and nearly the full length in profile, against about four fifths from the front, so the shortening fades as the head turns. The back views turn into the crown of the skull over a short neck, and the back of the head guide covers how to build that shape.

A quick exercise

1. Draw a level head from the front.
2. Next to it, draw the same head from about 20 degrees above, keeping the cranium the same size.
3. Draw the brow line, eye line and nose line as curves that dip in the middle.
4. Raise the ears so their tops sit above the brow and their lower ends sit above the base of the nose.
5. Shorten the face below the nose, and let the jaw cover most of the neck.
6. Draw the same head from below too, if you have done the head from below guide, and compare the curves on all three.

Then check your drawings against the plates. The minimal head and the heavy-jaw head are each shown from 20 degrees above in the head from above reference, and at level in Study Pack 04 and Study Pack 03.

For a view from much further above, see how to draw the head from a steep angle.

For a head that leans toward a shoulder as well, see how to draw a tilted head.

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