How to Draw the Human Head

Video Transcript

" Hi! I'm Pete Bellessis and I'm an art teacher. Today I am representing expertvillage.com and our lesson is drawing. We are going to further refine and define in our preliminary sketch here, the human figure. So pay attention as I show you how to bring this figure to life. We will decide on our gender. I have already hinted that I want to go male with this by my drawing and by my sketch and you will see. Okay, so what we'll do is we'll take a look at our form and decide which way we are going with it. I already said male, we've got things in place that are already hinted the male form and we'll start by logically getting some ears, depending on hair style will or will not be revealed completely. We are going to put them in about the middle of the head. Our eyes will wind up with about the top of our ears and a good rule of thumb for eyes first of all keep in mind they are more of an almond shape than anything. Not so much oval or egg like the head and then there is a difference; think of an almond. We are going to make them about that shape with the ability to race and further refine and later. You really have to basically imagine that this human has 3 eyes and the third eye, no it's not up on its forehead. It's right between the eyes. What this does is it allows for accurate spacing of the eyes and this sets us up for coming down with the nose and now we are frontal view and frontal view noses are some of the most difficult things to pull off here. The reason being is if you think back to some of your earlier drawings as a child you drew the nose in profile so you had this Piccassoesque type drawing with profile side view of a nose on a frontal view of a face and everything was askew. So we are going to instead focus on less lines and a little bit more what is called tonality or probably you know as shading; bring some lips. We will find our hair line, we'll give this guy some kind of conservative simple hair do. We are going to pull it off his head and he doesn't have close hair. At least my choice is for him not to; there we go, lines, we'll come back. Notice I'm moving around. I'm not really sticking to one area. His eyes are looking kind of big. I can make them smaller by giving them eyelids. Other details like eyelashes. You got to be careful with the male figures when it comes to those. They will look a little feminine if you are not careful. You can see that we are spending a lot of time just on the face and it takes time. We want to bring these details out in a realistic manner; maybe give some details to a chin, maybe some cheeks, side details, ears we are losing pretty much in the hair. Maybe some side burns, eyebrows are important of course; a little bit of reference. There you have it. You are ready to move on and that's it for this lesson. "