Drawing heads

A coworker asked how I drew heads. I never got the chance to demonstrate, so I thought I'd make a post about it!

1. Draw a shape. Doesn't have to be a circle, although I'll usually use those for female heads and rectangles for male heads. Not always though!

2. Draw your guidelines. This will be instrumental in determining where to draw the other parts of facial anatomy. If you start off drawing a "piece," like an eye or mouth, you'll end up with a really well-drawn eye, a really well-drawn mouth, and so on, but the whole face will look terrible; you have to build up.

3. I usually go for eyes first since they'll dictate more about the face than anything else.

4. Adding more facial features.

5. Sculpted the face a little more (the cheek especially), and added neck and shoulders so it's not just a floating head.

6. Hair. Rad has a good tutorial on the "hair shell gap" if you want to learn from a much better professional.

7. There's more steps between the previous and this one, but it was mostly minutiae. Here's the finished product with color and a little bit of shading.

Hope it wasn't too predictable!