How to draw a jawline: front, three-quarter and profile

A jaw drawn as one even curve from ear to ear is a common reason a head looks soft or young when it shouldn't. The lower jaw is a bone with a corner on each side, and even where that corner is soft, knowing where it sits keeps the lower face in proportion.

The figures here come from the square-jaw head, with the high-cheekbones head and the heavy-jaw head for comparison, all from the free head rotation reference.

Three landmarks

• The back edge: the line that drops from below the ear to the corner. Anatomy books call this part of the bone the ramus.
• The corner, where the back edge turns forward. It's called the angle of the jaw.
• The chin, where the jaw lines from both sides meet.

The jaw line is everything between the corner and the chin. In the usual construction you place the cranium, the center line, the brow and eye lines and the ear first; the jaw comes after them, so its landmarks can be measured against the ear and the mouth.

From the front

From the front, the back edge shows only as the side of the face between the earlobe and the corner. The corners sit a little inside the line of the ears, just below the lower lip, at the same height as in profile. Mark them as two points, then check their width against the cheekbones above: on the square-jaw head they sit narrower than the cheekbones, and the jaw line runs from each one to a broad, flat-bottomed chin.

These plates are lit from above, so a shadow falls on the neck under the jaw, darkest under the chin. With a light from above it marks where the jaw ends and the neck begins, which helps when the contour itself is faint.

At three-quarter

As the head turns, the near corner stays below the near earlobe and shows as a visible bend in the outline, and the jaw line runs from it across to the chin. At 45 degrees the far jaw is hidden: the far outline is the brow, the nose, the lips and the chin, so only the near jaw line gets drawn. At a smaller turn, such as 22.5 degrees, the far cheek still shows and its outline runs down to the chin.

The high-cheekbones head at the same angle has its landmarks in similar places, but the corner is a soft turn rather than a bend, and the jaw line curves on its way to a rounder chin. Locate the corner the same way, then decide how sharp to draw it from the head in front of you.

In profile

In profile both parts of the jaw show. The back edge starts below the earlobe and drops toward the corner, which sits level with the hollow under the lower lip, a little below the lip itself (measured on ten heads). From the corner the jaw line runs forward and down, then curves up into the front of the chin. The heavy-jaw head in profile has a long jaw line with a deep shadow under it.

Two placements go wrong often in profile. A corner drawn far behind the ear makes the jaw too long, and a corner drawn up at the earlobe makes it too short. Check the corner against the earlobe and the hollow under the lower lip.

Common mistakes

• One even curve from ear to ear. Locate the corners as points first, even on a soft jaw.
• Both corners at three-quarter. By 45 degrees the far jaw is behind the face.
• Corners at the wrong height. In profile they sit level with the hollow under the lower lip, not at the earlobe and not at the chin.

A short exercise

Open the square-jaw head page and draw it at 0, 45 and 90 degrees, placing the corner, the back edge and the chin as dots before any line. Then draw the high-cheekbones head at the same angles and compare how sharp each corner is.

For more on how a jaw changes a face, see drawing different face shapes from one construction. When the head tips back, the underside of the jaw becomes a plane of its own; how to draw the head from below covers it. How to draw a chin goes on from the front end of the jaw. The square-jaw head is sold alone as Study Pack 07 and with five other heads in Volume 2.

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