A ten-week plan for drawing heads, hands and feet
Archive of Fine Arts
Each guide in this journal takes one view or one feature. This page puts them into ten weeks of short sessions, so the skull you learn in the first week is still under the head you shade in the seventh.
The plan assumes twenty minutes a day, five days a week. Most weeks run the same way: on the first day, read the week's main guide and try its drawing once; on days two to four, repeat that drawing; on day five, run the check. Weeks three and five instead take one step a day. The other guides named each week are for when a check goes wrong, so a day spent reading one of them counts as a session. Write the date on every sheet and keep them: the last week compares new drawings with the first ones.
Draw small, about the size of your palm, and don't erase until the session is over. A wrong line left on the page tells you more at the end than one you rebuilt three times. On days with five spare minutes, warm up with the timed head practice, which shuffles the angles so you meet views you wouldn't pick.
Week 1: the skull
Start with how to draw a skull at different angles: the cranium as a ball with flat sides, the face hung under its front, the jaw hinged in front of the ear hole. Then draw the skull at four angles, front, three-quarter, profile and back, five minutes each, and repeat the four on days two to four.
On the fifth day, check the view that went worst against the front, the side or the three-quarter view. Every head after this week is drawn over the same construction.
Week 2: the head from the front and the side
Read how to draw the head from the front and in profile, and parts of the head if the names of the landmarks are new. Each day, draw a front view and a profile of the same head, both built from the ball, the center line, the eye line and the thirds.
On the fifth day, measure your pair against face proportions and side profile proportions. If you already start heads with a Loomis ball or a box, Loomis, box or planes fits either to the same landmarks.
Week 3: the turn
Take the steps between the front and the back in order, one a day, each drawn three times on one sheet: slight three-quarter and three-quarter together on day one, then near profile, three-quarter back and the back.
On the fifth day, do the 20-minute rotation drill: sixteen small heads, one construction through the whole turn. Keep this sheet, because you draw it again in week ten. If the head stops looking like the same person partway round, read why construction lines drift.
Week 4: up, down and tilted
The head from below and from above show what the eye line and the ears do when the head tips. A tilted head leans toward a shoulder, and the neck puts the head back on its cylinder. Draw each tipped view beside the level view of the same head, so the change sits side by side on the page.
On the fifth day, draw a three-quarter head from above and from below and compare the second with three-quarter from below.
Week 5: the features
One feature a day for four days: the nose, the eyes, the ears and the mouth. Draw each at the front, three-quarter and profile, on a head outline rather than alone on the page.
On the fifth day, put all four on one three-quarter head and check that each sits on the lines you placed in week two.
Week 6: different faces
Every head so far has shared one set of proportions. Drawing different face shapes from one construction moves a few landmarks to get a square jaw, high cheekbones or a heavy brow. An older face and facial expressions add folds and movement to the same head. Each day, draw one head three times: as you built it in week two, then changed two ways.
On the fifth day, draw the two most different faces you can from one construction, at the same angle.
Week 7: light
Read the planes of the head, then how to shade a head, one light at a time. Each day, shade one head under one light from the lighting reference in that guide's four passes: pick the light, find the shadow edge, lay one flat shadow tone, then add the cast shadows.
On the fifth day, shade the same head under two of the reference's lights and check that the shadow edge moves while the planes stay where they were. If you shade with lines, how to hatch a face sets which way they run.
Week 8: hands
How to draw hands at different angles builds the hand as a box with an arc of knuckles and the thumb on its own side. Each day, draw one hand at the palm, the edge, the back and a three-quarter view, starting every one with the box, and measure one of them against the palm, the side or the back. How to draw fingers checks where each fingertip lands.
On the fifth day, close the hand around a cup or a pen, and check it with a hand holding something and a fist.
Week 9: feet
How to draw feet at different angles builds the foot as a wedge with the heel as a block behind it. Each day, draw one foot from the inside, the front, the outside and the back, five minutes each.
On the fifth day, check one view against the front, the side, three-quarter or the back.
Week 10: draw week one again
Repeat the skull sheet from week one and the rotation drill from week three, with the same time limits. Lay each new sheet beside the old one and circle the view that improved least. The week that taught it is the one to repeat next.
What to draw from
Every guide above has its own figures, and the head rotation reference shows ten heads at up to sixteen angles, in pencil and in tone, free. For the hands and feet, your own are the nearest model: draw your free hand, and a bare foot propped on a low stool. That is enough for all ten weeks.
The full archives behind each week: the skull turnaround for week one, head rotation volume 1 and volume 2 for weeks two to six, the head parts volume for week five, the lighting reference volume for week seven, and hands and feet, volume 1 for weeks eight and nine. The everything bundle has all of them in one purchase, with the pencil library of 110 heads for week six.
For the head guides alone, in the order we'd read them, see how to draw the head at any angle.