Three-quarter back: the angle every reference skips

Three-quarter back is easy to avoid. It shows too little face to use familiar portrait spacing, but too much face to treat the drawing as a plain back view. The ear becomes prominent, the jaw turns away, and the small visible facial wedge can make the whole head look twisted if it is too wide.

The answer is to organize the large rear mass first. The face is the final piece, not the starting point.

Draw the back of the cranium first

Begin with a rounded cranial mass. Mark the center line on the far side, where only a small part of it may remain visible. Most of the page-facing surface belongs to the back and side of the skull.

Find the widest point above and behind the ear. If that width sits too low, the cranium becomes a box. If it sits too far forward, the back of the head collapses and the face takes over.

Do not draw the facial profile yet. Establish the rear contour from crown to base of skull, then connect it to the neck.

Use the ear as the hinge

The ear sits near the transition between the large cranial mass and the small facial wedge. Block it as a simple tilted shape. Its height gives you a band for the brow and nose base, even when those landmarks are barely visible.

The near ear is readable, but it should not become the center of the head. Check the space behind it. There must be enough cranium to make the head feel like a volume rather than a face with an ear attached.

Add the far ear only if it is actually visible in the reference. Inventing a matching pair can pull the drawing back toward a straight rear view.

Attach a narrow facial wedge

From the brow area, let the brow and the cheekbone break the far contour by a short distance. At 135 degrees on the ten heads measured below, the nose stays hidden behind the cheek. The eye may be a small notch under the brow or may disappear. The mouth line compresses, but at 135 the chin is still on the outline.

Keep this wedge narrow. A common mistake is to draw a normal three-quarter face and paste it onto a back-facing cranium. That gives the skull one direction and the features another.

Draw the jaw from the ear toward the chin. The visible edge should turn inward sooner than it does in a side view. Compare the jaw angle with the neck so those two lines do not run as a single parallel stripe.

Keep the construction lines on the surface

Wrap a brow rail from the ear band toward the small visible face. It should shorten as it approaches the far contour. Add the side-plane boundary around the cranium, then check whether it agrees with the ear and jaw.

The center line, brow rail, and side-plane boundary should all describe the same turn. If one line reads as profile while another reads as back view, simplify the drawing and correct the cranial mass before adding features.

Measured on ten drawn heads

We measured this view on the ten bald heads of our head turntable, at 135 degrees and one step further round, at 157.5 degrees. The unit is the skull width: the skull at its widest, seen from behind, as in the back of the head. Above the ears the drawing is about a sixth to a third wider than the skull at 135 degrees, about a fifth wider on a typical head, and barely wider to about a sixth wider at 157.5 degrees.

At 135 degrees:

1. The ear sits two thirds of the way across. Measured across the drawing level with the middle of the ear, the ear's back edge sits about two thirds to nearly three quarters of the way from the back outline, about seven tenths on a typical head, and its front edge about four fifths to six sevenths of the way. About two thirds of the drawing is cranium behind the ear.
2. The back reaches furthest at the top of the ear or higher. The back outline is furthest out a third to nearly halfway down the head from the crown, level with the top of the ear or above it on all ten.
3. The face is a strip in front of the ear. From the front of the ear to the edge of the face is about a sixth to a little over a quarter of a skull width, about a fifth on a typical head.
4. The brow reaches furthest. Nothing lower on the face's edge reaches noticeably further out. Under the brow the edge dips in at the eye, comes out again at the cheekbone and runs down to the chin. No nose breaks the edge on any of the ten; we judged that by eye, since the cheekbone covers where the nose would be.
5. The chin is still on the outline. The face's edge turns back under the jaw just above the chin row, by no more than 3 percent of the head's height, on all ten. From there the line under the jaw runs back to the neck.

At 157.5 degrees the face is gone and the near ear takes over the face side. Its front edge is close to the outline, within a twentieth of a skull width, and its back edge sits four fifths to nearly nine tenths of the way across. The far ear now sticks out of the back outline on all ten as a clear bump. At 135 it's hidden on all ten. So leave the far ear off at 135 and draw it at 157.5 degrees.

The heads are drawn plates in one style, at eye level, with no hair; on most real heads hair covers the ears and the back outline. Three are drawn tipped a little chin-up, which may move the chin slightly; we didn't separate that out. The numbers describe these drawings, not people's heads, so check them against your own reference.

Practice it as a transition

Draw three small heads in a row: profile, three-quarter back, and back. Use only the outer contour, center line, ear, and jaw. The middle drawing should borrow some depth from the profile and most of its visible mass from the back.

Then reverse the order. Moving from back to profile often exposes a different habit. You may widen the face too quickly or keep the ear visible for too long. Make one correction at a time and repeat the three-head transition.

When the sequence works, add the brow, nose base, and mouth rail. Detail comes last because the angle is carried by the cranium, ear, and jaw.

The free head rotation sampler includes a back-facing turn and a loop if you want to practice this transition with a small set first.

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