Alright, now we have covered the whole body it’s time to start working on the details! Below is an image of the step by step construction of a head at several different angles.
Lets start with the straight on view at the top and work down. As you can see, the head can be constructed in the same basic three steps as the rest of the body (I have separated the final step into two here, basic features followed by finer detail).
The most important things to take note of are the hair and the eye line. The hair is not plastered to the head, but is drawn around it and away from it. This style isn't the best example due to the deep spikes, but in general the circle of the hair should always be bigger than that of the head to add volume. The eyes are halfway between the top of the head and the bottom of the chin. It is a common mistake to focus on the face and put the eyes too high which works fine for many of our favourite western cartoon characters but doesn't really work for manga which is much more realistic proportionally.
As for the eyes themselves, they come in many shapes and sizes but the men tend to have smaller more realistically proportioned eyes than manga women. As a rough guide, the inside edges of the eyes should be around the outside edge of the nose. The eyelashes (difficult to tell apart here as the drawing is small but the spikes on the inside edge) can come in a little further than this (as shown here) if your guy has more girly fuller eyes.
The hairline varies, but is usually just below the halfway mark between the eyes and the top of the head even though it obviously isn't always a straight line. This is where your bangs will come from even if they flop down over your character’s face. The nose ends roughly halfway between the eyes and chin, the mouth being just above halfway between the end of the nose and the chin. Human beings seem to work on ‘just about halves’ a lot, so use this to your advantage! The neck is roughly three quarters of the width of the head (don’t make necks too skinny or your character’s heads will fall off! Only joking, but they will look like they are about to fall off).
Looking at the fine detail, you will see lines above the eyes (unless the character is really surprised) showing the full extent of the eyeball as the eye is not fully open. Another line can be used to define the lower lip and even the upper in finer feminine characters in larger drawings (the line above the upper lip in the bottom picture was actually me dropping my pen. I leave any mistakes here to prove we are all human!). The eyes were really quickly done and the detail within a good eye is too complex to mention here (wait for my eyes tutorial) but note the location of the eyebrows and angle of the eyes may change with expression. Take a good look at human ears… they are hell to draw! I find a simple outer top line with an inner not-closed circle works as a good simplification. The final touch will be the muscle/tendon lines on the neck from the corner of the jaw moving down towards the gap between the collar bones.
In order to get the three quarters view, take a good look at the frontal view and the profile. Notice how the ears are about a quarter of the head from the back of the skull? The nose and lips are especially difficult in profile but the same location apply as for the frontal view. If you can grasp the frontal and profile three quarters should be easy! Once you have them all experiment with images of your favourite characters and see if you can draw a whole spectrum from full frontal to full profile. The key thing is to remember that the eyes are a little more compact in profile and slightly different in shape than when seen from the front. The iris and pupil also tend to be squished (taller and narrower) and close to the front of the eye.
The final two, looking up and looking down, are probably the most difficult. The way to do it is look at where the curved line for the eyes in the first step starts and finishes. The same place (on the midline) as before right? Yep. It just curves up or down! From there you can work out the location of the ears (above the eyes when looking down, opposite for looking up,they don’t really move that much as they are close to the centre of rotation) and the chin. The chin is easy when looking down (it pivots in and only drops slightly, the whole head may also drop if they bend down a little but we will look at that when we get to crazy poses) but looking up is often difficult. I messed up quite a bit here but the general principle is follow the central face line to the location of the chin, and join it to the points of the jaw (level with the bottom of the head construction circle) with a triangle, either facing up or down depending on the degree of elevation. The key is that simple! Connect up that jaw!
Experiment with your own characters (or fanart if adventurous) and keep practising until you get these angles right, then move on to some more unusual stuff and surprise me!
See you next Wednesday for another tutorial!
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