Today I'm going to teach you the core principles of drawing the head and face. We're going to do a 3/4 type view first.

If you take a look at the image above I've shown that the basic head is an oval for the face and a sphere that is the upper part of the skull.

If you take the oval and draw a line down the middle, a pattern emerges, which I've written in the drawing.

If you divide the oval into 4ths, the top 4th line is where the hair starts. The 50% mark is where the eyes and top of the nose are AND where the top of the ears start.

At the bottom quarter mark is the bottom of the nose. If you then divide that last quarter in half again, the bottom of THAT line is the bottom of the lower lip (can vary a little, human variance is pretty big here).

Let's go ahead and add the big features

I've gone ahead and added a bunch of the features so you can see how these play out. You don't need to even use super realistic shapes. Try doing it cartoon style - the proportions still work.

More detail

So here I've corrected a few things. Here are some other useful measurements:

1. The distance BETWEEN the eyes is generally the same as the size of one eye.
2. The lips stretch to right before the pupils of the eyes (but big variance here, use that as just a baseline).
3. The nostrils added together are as wide as about 150% of the ride/main shaft of the nose. But here, again, is huge variance to create individual looks.

This pattern extends to all ethnicities but I've drawn a caucasian face here mostly because that's what I have practice doing. Changing some of the sizes and shapes of nose and mouth (the areas with high variance) and skin tone will create different racial characteristics. Asian eyes are obviously a bit different, and I'll be working on figuring that out and I'll make a tutorial on that too.

Like all my tutorials, you should be able to get in good practice in under 30 min.

If you want more, just follow @rampant