How to Draw a Face from any Angle | Part 1 - Front & Side View

Hey! I'm Darlene and you're watching a Rapid Fire Art tutorial. In this two-part video series, I'm going to cover the Loomis method for drawing the human head in any angle. I'll show you step-by-step how to draw four different head positions. In this video, I'll cover the front and side view and leave the three-quarter heads for part two. These are the tools I'm going to use. A colored pencil for drawing construction lines and a graphite pencil for the finalized drawings. If you want to create your own reference material, you'll need a styrofoam ball and marker to draw lines on it. You'll need a toothpick and finally, a kneadable eraser. We're going to make some models with these to help us draw certain facial features. If you don't have a kneadable eraser, you can use Play-Doh. See recipe below. Another handy reference would be a rotatable human skull. All of these tools will be linked up in the description. Let's start with the easiest angle, the front view. I'm using a colored pencil for the construction lines so you can still see the construction of the head after it's drawn. The first step is to draw a circle. Limit movement in your fingers and wrist and move your elbow and shoulder instead. Just hover over your sketchbook creating circular motions. When the movement looks and feels right, lower your pencil to create a faint circle. I'm making it dark so the instructions are clear but try to keep your construction lines very light. The next step is to create a vertical and horizontal line that goes through the center of your circle. This is the middle line and this one is the brow line where the eyebrows go. Since the side of the human head is more flat, let's cut off the sides of our circle. To cut off just the right amount, split this section into three equal spaces from the center of your circle to the top. Do the same for the bottom half. The top third will mark the top of our cut and the bottom third marks the bottom. Cut off the other side as well. I can't erase pencil crayon so just imagine that the sides are gone. Extend the middle line down so we can draw his feature lines. We already know where the eyebrows are going to go so next we'll need to figure out the placement of the hairline, nose, and chin. In cutting off the sides of our sphere, we've actually created the hairline and nose line already. For an average male face, all of these features will be spaced evenly so to find the chin line, simply take a measurement from brow to nose and bring it down here. Now we have four horizontal feature lines that are spaced evenly apart. Just doing a double check. To complete our head shape, we'll need to draw the jaw line. Extend the side of the head down a little and then curve into the chin. When you draw the other side, make sure the corners of your jaw are lined up so one side isn't higher than the other. Now we have a complete head shape. There are two more lines you might want to draw. The eye line goes between the brow and nose and is about a third of the way down. I know there's a lot of measuring but if you practice a lot, you won't need to draw so many lines or make as many measurements anymore. And then between the nose and chin, there's the mouth which is a little closer to the nose. Let's start adding his features now. The ears are attached to sides of the head and go from the brow to nose. Start your stroke near the eye line using the brow and nose as boundaries. Between where the ear shape started and ended, draw a bump. Extend it down up to the right and then to the left. Now we're going to use this part of the ear shape as a guideline to draw a similar shape that runs close to the edge. Now draw his other ear. Drawing the rest of his features can be very intimidating. Before we actually draw any of them, we need to learn where each feature fits on the face. Then we can worry about how to draw each one. A good way to approach this is to first practice drawing the human skull because it really helps to understand the structure beneath all that skin. Study and draw the skull from many angles. There are many apps and online references that you can use to study from like the one I showed you earlier. So I'll leave that part up to you. You can also learn how to draw the muscles which is covered in the book. Learning how to draw a planar head will also come in handy. It's basically a blocky simplified version of the head where it's broken down into simple shapes. When you practice drawing this, it helps you better visualize where the facial features go and it will give you a better grasp at the subject in a three-dimensional space. With these two references, you can probably vividly picture where the features go already. It takes some time to learn this but if you put in the time, your drawing skills will level up dramatically. You can go right ahead and actually draw the planar head over your drawing very lightly to block out the different sections from one another. There are many ways to draw a planar head as you can tell from a quick google search. The loomis one is a little different from what I'm doing now. I like to do just the face and ignore the rest of the head but when you're practicing, it's probably a good idea to draw the whole thing. Please refer to the book for more info on this. Along the brow line, let's draw his eyebrows. Slant them up at the ends. Draw the other eyebrow while making sure each corner is level with the first one. Use your planar sketch to draw the nose. I'm going to rest his nose on the line labeled nose and balance it along the middle line to keep his face looking symmetrical. Where the middle line and nose intersect, draw a small curve and then above that to the right and left, draw his nostrils. I'm not going to go into much detail on how to draw each individual feature because those will need to be covered in separate videos. To place his eyes, draw a vertical line from the wing of the nose going up. The eye will start there and each one will be about the same width as the nose. For each eye, you can draw a trapezoid-like shape, something more rounded though, or a football shape. Draw his eyes right above the eye line. Let's add a crease at the top. It just roughly follows the eye shape. Make sure the corners of his eyes are level with each other. To draw the lips, I'm going to use a different method from Andrew Loomis, sort of just making it up on the spot. Draw a line where you want the opening of the mouth to go. I'm going to use a red line so you can see it better, again drawing it closer to the nose than the chin. By the way, if you want to see the Loomis method for placing the mouth, you should pick up his book, which I'll link to down below. Let me draw a large example so you can see more clearly. In the middle, draw a curve. To the sides, draw the corner of the mouth using small ticks, then connect the dots using a wavy line in the shape of your choice. Draw the outline for his top lip, creating an M-like shape. The bottom lip is just sort of like a very wide U shape. Let's draw it on the face now. For the corners of the mouth, I like to align it somewhere between the end of the nose to the middle of the eye. Let's draw his cheeks now. If you want to really define his cheeks but don't know where to start, it helps to visualize his skull. Also, knowing where the cheekbones end will help you understand which areas you can hollow out. For his jaw, use your construction lines as a rough guide. I'm going to give him a dimpled chin. For his neck, draw an invisible line from the end of your eye or eyebrow going down. That's how thick I'll draw the neck. The side of the head is a little more rounded than this, so round off the corners and make the straight line more curvy. To draw his hair, you can use the hairline as a reference point, which will give him a medium-sized forehead. Draw above or below this to give him a larger or smaller forehead. I'm going to start here and bring my stroke up and out. You can also draw this shape, which is a little pointier. Extend your stroke down along the side, going towards the eyebrow. Stop before you get too close. Bring your strokes out again, along the ear, and let it disappear. I'm just making sure that these corners are level with each other. You can leave it like this so he has a buzz cut or give his hair a lot more volume. First, select where you want his parting line to be, where he parts his hair, then draw hair on both sides. I'm going to brush most of it over to the left, and that completes our head drawn from the front view. We're going to use the exact same method to draw the last three heads, so you're going to see the same patterns come up over and over again. Now let's apply the same steps for a head in the side view. Draw a circle. Draw a straight vertical and horizontal line through the very center. Since we're drawing a head from the side now, this line is now called the ear line, and this is the middle line. Extend your middle line straight down, creating the front of his face. This one is still the brow line. To find the hair, nose, and chin lines, split the top and bottom half of your circle in three. The top third will mark the hairline, and the bottom third will mark the nose line. The space in between each feature should be equal. So to find the chin line, take the measurement between brow and nose and bring it down here. Draw a full circle between the hair and nose line to represent the flat side of his head, or the side plane. That's the part we cut off when drawing the first head. It looks like a circle when viewed from the side. The eye is about a third of the way down from brow to nose. And then draw the mouth line, which is slightly closer to the nose than the chin. To complete the head shape, draw the jaw line, which runs from the bottom of the side plane to the chin. The shape of his cranium is less of a circle and more of an oval. To draw the back of his neck, roughly align your pencil with the nose line and the base of his cranium. Halfway between the front and center of his head, draw the front part of his neck. Let's draw the ear between the brow and nose, placing it in this quadrant. It's actually slanted back like so, instead of perfectly vertical. The ear shape is also kind of similar to an oval, I find. So if you want to have a rough guideline to draw within, create a faint oval. Between your first and last stroke, draw a bump. Extend down, up to the right, and then up to the left. Duplicate the ear outline inside the ear. And if you want to add more detail, draw a shape opposite of this one. Let's draw his facial features. Start at the brow by creating a large curve. Extend upwards to create the forehead. I'm trying not to follow the circle, otherwise his head will look too round. Below the brow, you can draw a light triangle, the simplified version of a nose to use as a guideline to draw a more detailed one. Experiment with different shapes to get a bunch of cool looking noses. Let me switch back to my graphite pencil. Use the triangle as a rough guide to draw a more detailed nose shape. To the right side of the middle line, draw the nose wing. And then for the nostril, draw a rotated number six. Time to draw his mouth. Without going too far past the nose, draw a small tick to mark the corner of his lips. Define the opening of the mouth by drawing a wavy line. Then draw the upper and lower lips. Bring your stroke out to create a nice full chin. Then use the construction lines to draw the neck and jaw. Let's draw his eyebrow along the brow line. The tail kind of ends at the side plane here. Draw an imaginary line from the side of his nose going up. We'll draw his eye to the right of that, resting it on the eye line. Start with the eyeball, then add the top and bottom lids. It kind of resembles a triangle. You can add a crease like this and eyelashes. Follow your construction lines to draw the rest of his head and neck. Let's draw his hair now. Go along the hairline. We can use the side plane as a loose guide. Draw toward the ear. Draw his sideburn, wrap around the ear, all the way back to the nape of his neck. Let's give his hair more volume. And that's pretty much how you draw a head from the side view using the Loomis method. This is the end of part one. If you want to learn how to draw the other two heads, please click on the video in the end screen or in the description to watch part two. Before you go, don't forget to hit that like button, comment, and subscribe. I'll catch you later in part two.