How to draw the head from behind, slightly turned

Turn the back of the head a little to one side and it stops looking like a back view, even though no face shows. On the head rotation reference this is the near-back view, 157.5 degrees, one step short of looking straight at the back of the skull. No face shows, but it points toward one side, and the whole turn shows in the two ears, the center line and a thin edge of jaw on that side. Below, the ear on the far side is the outline ear, and the one on the face's side is the face-side ear.

How to draw it in four steps

1. Draw the cranium as a ball and the neck below it, as for the back of the head.
2. Draw the center line of the back of the head a little off the middle, toward the outline ear, and curve it around the ball.
3. Let the outline ear stand out of the outline, as both ears do in the back view.
4. At the face-side ear, the outline no longer ends at the ear. Carry it on past the ear as a narrow strip of the side of the skull, and below the ear as the edge of the jaw running down toward the neck. On most heads the strip is thin, so keep it thin.

That strip past the ear is the step that does the turning. End the outline at the ear and the head looks straight away from you again.

What changes from the back view

From the back, at 180 degrees, the two ears match and the center line runs down the middle. One step round, at 157.5 degrees, the ears stop matching: the outline ear stays on the edge, the face-side ear has the side of the head showing past it, and the center line slides toward the outline ear. Another step, at three-quarter back, the outline ear has gone behind the skull, and the cheek and the edge of the face show past the face-side ear.

So 157.5 sits between two views you may already draw: it keeps both ears from the back view and borrows a thin strip of side plane from three-quarter back.

Three ways it goes wrong

Matching ears. Two ears of the same size, both on the outline, give you a back view. Show the side of the head and the jaw past the face-side ear.

The outline ear gone. If only one ear shows, you've drawn three-quarter back. At 157.5 degrees the outline ear is still there.

A straight center line in the middle. The center line is how the back of the head shows its turn. Keep it off the middle and curved over the ball, or the turn sits only in the ears.

Practice it

On one sheet, draw the back, the near-back view and three-quarter back of the same head, with the same ball for all three, and give each drawing about five minutes. Between the first two, only the ears, the center line and the jaw edge change; by the third, the edge of the face shows too. Then turn the head the other way, which is 202.5 degrees on the reference.

The reference page for this angle shows all ten heads at 157.5 degrees in tone and nine of them in pencil. Head rotation volume 1 has the hard-plane and gaunt-planes heads above at sixteen angles, and volume 2 the square-jaw head.

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