How to draw the head from a steep angle

A head seen from far above or far below, in a bird's-eye or worm's-eye view, is where small errors show most, because every proportion you learned at eye level has moved. The way in is to watch one head move through the angles in steps, and to see that a steep angle is the gentle one taken further.

The figures here are from the tilt plates of our book How to Draw the Head (plate 19 and plate 19 continued): one study head from the front, seen from 40 and 20 degrees above, at eye level, and from 20 and 40 degrees below. The red lines are the center line and the brow, eye, nose and mouth lines, the rings that run around the head at each feature.

At eye level the lines run straight

Eye level. The brow, eye, nose and mouth lines run straight across, and the ears run from between the brow and eye lines down to the base of the nose.

Each red line is a ring around the head. Seen exactly side on, a ring is a straight line. Once you look at it from above or below, you see a little of its top or its underside, and it curves. How much it curves tells you how far above or below the head you are.

From above, the lines curve toward the chin

From 20 degrees above. The feature lines dip in the middle by about a fifth of the width of the skull.

From 40 degrees above. The lines dip by about a third of the skull's width, the whole ear sits above the eyes and the top of the skull fills more than half of the head.

From 20 degrees above, the lines curve gently toward the chin. From 40 degrees above, they curve almost twice as much. We measured the dip of the brow, eye and nose lines on both plates: on average it grows from about a fifth to a little over a third of the skull's width.

Look at what that does to the rest of the face. The skull above the brow grows until it is more than half the height of the drawing. The face below it shortens, and the shortening is strongest under the nose: the tip of the nose reaches down toward the mouth line, and the mouth sits close to the chin. The ears stay on the sides of the skull while the face tips away from you, so they rise against the features. At 20 degrees the top of the ear is above the brow. At 40 degrees the whole ear is above the eye line.

From below, the lines curve toward the crown

From 20 degrees below. The lines arch up by about a fifth of the skull's width, and the ears have dropped against the features.

From 40 degrees below. The lines arch up by about a third of the skull's width, the forehead is a narrow band and the ears hang beside the underside of the jaw.

Below eye level everything runs the other way. The lines arch up toward the crown, and from 40 degrees below they arch about twice as much as from 20, a little over a third of the skull's width against about a fifth.

The forehead, which took up so much of the view from above, shrinks to a narrow band over the brow. The nostrils open. A new surface appears: the underside of the jaw, from the chin back to the corners of the jaw, which from 40 degrees below takes up a large part of the lower face. Draw it as a plane of its own, with the front of the neck running down from it. The ears drop against the features. At 20 degrees their tops are just above the base of the nose and their lower ends below the mouth, and at 40 degrees the whole ear is below the mouth line, beside the jaw.

Why forty is not quite double twenty

The curve of a ring follows the sine of the angle you see it from, not the angle itself. The sine of 40 degrees is a little under two thirds and the sine of 20 degrees a little over a third, so doubling the angle bows the lines a little less than twice as much. That is what the plates measure, from above and from below.

In practice this gives you a quick check. Draw the head at a gentle angle first and look at how much the eye line bows. For a view about twice as steep, bow it a little less than twice as much, and move the ears and the large end of the head to match.

A quick exercise

Draw the level front view with its center line and four straight feature lines.
Draw the same head from about 20 degrees above, curving the lines down in the middle by about a fifth of the skull's width.
Draw it again from about 40 degrees above, curving them by about a third. Let the skull grow and the face below the nose shorten.
Repeat from below: arch the lines up, shrink the forehead and add the underside of the jaw.
Lay the five drawings in a row and check the ears. They should climb past the features as the views go up, and drop past them as the views go down.

The head from above and head from below guides cover the 20 degree views in more detail, at three-quarter and in profile as well as from the front. For a head that also leans toward a shoulder, see how to draw a tilted head.

The full tilt plates, with the same head at three turns and the gentler angles in tone as well as line, are in How to Draw the Head, the book that comes with Head rotation volume 1, volume 2 and the head library.

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