How to draw the head in profile

A profile looks like the easiest view to draw. There is one eye, one ear, and a clean edge from forehead to chin. Profile drawings usually fail at the back of the head. People draw the face first, then add a skull behind it, and the skull comes out too small. The finished head looks like a mask with a cap on it.

Work the other way round: in profile the head is about as deep, front to back, as it is tall from the crown to the chin. Start with that depth and the face has somewhere to sit. On the ten heads in the reference, the back of the skull to the brow measures about nine tenths of the height, give or take a twentieth, and to the tip of the nose about the full height; the box method guide lists each head.

Start with the cranium, not the nose

Draw a ball for the cranium and give it room. In the side view the back of the skull bulges past the hollow at the back of the neck, by about a twelfth to a fifth of the head's height, crown to chin, on our ten drawn turntable heads, as how to draw a bald head measures, so leave space behind it on the page. Then add the side plane of the face as a flatter shape hanging from the front and bottom of that ball. The brow sits at the front edge of the cranium; the chin hangs below it.

Two construction lines do most of the work. A horizontal line through the brow wraps around the side of the skull. A vertical line drops through the middle of the cranium. In the profile plates of the 90 degree reference that vertical line falls at or just in front of the ear, which sits behind the middle of the head.

For the face itself, the heights are the front view's heights. On the ten profiles the eyes sit around halfway from the crown to the chin, from a little above to a little below, and the space from the base of the nose to the chin is usually a little shorter than the space from the brow to the nose; side profile proportions measures each head.

Put the ear behind the middle

The ear is the anchor of the side view. It sits at or just behind that vertical line, so the face side of the head is longer than the back side. Its top sits a little above the eye line, below the brow ridge, and its lobe a little below the base of the nose. If the ear drifts forward toward the cheek, the face shrinks and the skull swells. If it drifts back, the face gets too long and the head looks pushed forward.

The ear also tilts back a little rather than standing upright, but far less than the slope of the nose: about 12 degrees on these plates, against 25 to 34 for the nose. How to draw ears from the side measures its lean, width and place in the head's depth. For how its shape changes through the rest of the turn, see how to draw ears at every angle.

Let the jaw run back to the ear

The jaw line starts at the chin and travels back and up to just under the ear. Draw it as one long line before adding the angle of the jaw. A short jaw line that stops halfway is a common profile error, and it leaves the neck with nothing to attach to.

The neck doesn't come straight down from the chin. Its front edge turns down from the line under the jaw on the row of the chin or just below it, and its back edge leaves from under the skull, well behind the ear. Both lean forward: on the ten drawn heads in how to draw the neck, the back edge about 15 degrees (6 to 24) and the throat about 27 (18 to 40).

Read the face as a stack of forms

Once the big shapes hold, the face is a sequence of forms stepping forward and back down the edge: brow, the dip at the bridge of the nose, the nose, the upper lip, the lower lip, the chin. Compare how far each one projects. On the heavy-brow head the brow stands out past the bridge of the nose. On the full-lips head the lips push past a line drawn from the nose tip to the chin. These differences make one profile look like one person, but they only read on a skull that's right.

The eye in profile is a wedge that sits back from the bridge of the nose, set in under the brow.

Check it against the turn

A side view is one of sixteen views around the head, and it shows up twice, once from each side. Look at the views on either side, near profile and just behind profile. The ear should barely move between them while the face either opens up or slides away. If your profile could not turn into those neighbors without growing a new skull, go back and rebuild the cranium.

To practice the full turn on one head, each study pack gives sixteen angles of the same 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.