Mentor Experiment: Head Design

contours for heads

This week we’ll look at heads. Heads come in all shapes and sizes, it’s up to us to find a method to break the shape down into a basic form. Start with a primitive volumetric form, like a sphere, oval, or even a flour sack. Remember that the head is not flat – it has volume!

Once you have drawn the volumetric form, the next task is to establish the character’s eye line. In the top row below, you’ll see that event though the head shape and features are all the same, by establishing the eye line (horizontal axis) at different levels, we can get characters that look similar, yet different.


Volumetric surfaces have contours (lines) that follow the form. It’s important that you place the eyes on the eye line, but also adhere to making sure the eyes, nose and mouth follow the form of the head.

This week’s task is fairly straight-forward:

1) Draw 5 heads with different volumetric forms. Establish the contour lines for each form.

2) Draw 5 heads using the same volumetric form, but vary the eye line. Keep all the features identical.

3) Take the same volumetric form from #2 and now develop 5 distinct characters (young, old, male, female, anthropomorphic, etc.)

Good luck! And feel free to share your progress by way of a link in the comments below.


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