How To Draw Different Head Shapes

This video is all about caricature .

We're going to start with our simple standard head shape and then distort it in a wide variety of ways .

We'll play with some different proportions for our features and then we'll use some examples to bring it all together .

Finally , we'll look at some very cartoony reference to start exploring some caricature of our own .

If you enjoyed this video , please hit like and subscribe and be sure to share with your friends and here we're gonna go ahead and start to look at how we can take our standard head form .

I'm gonna draw it quickly three quarters .

I'm gonna make this nice and fast .

My brow line , my nose , my chin , my mouth would be just about here and adjust my overall simple basic shape even before we get down to features to really adjust the types of faces that I'm drawing .

My mouth would be just about here and there we go .

And if I want to draw a character that's very different looking , it's very easy for me to just start experimenting with shapes .

And so what I'm gonna do is go with a shape that's much more like this and so very large at the top , very small at the bottom .

I'm gonna put my eyes , my brow line here , my nose here , my mouth here , my jaw line would be here .

Here's the center line for my head .

My ear be way out here , I think because I've got my head larger along that side and maybe I'll make that ear just a little bit visible on the other side .

And so here's when I saw it , here's my other one and it really is pretty amazing .

I , I think I should probably not make his head round .

At that point .

I still want to have some form of anatomy going on with this .

My nose will be just right here , my mouth here and I can get a very different head just by changing that overall shape and you can see it still looks like a pretty realistic head and much more childlike .

I think .

So now I'm gonna try a different shape .

I'm just gonna go the opposite way and let's draw sheep more like this .

And so I'm gonna draw and I'm not adjusting the height of my features very much .

I'm still keeping them pretty neutral , adjust those things in a minute .

So my nose will be here , my mouth will be here , here's my chin , center line to my head I think will be just about here .

So my ear will come out here .

I draw my other ear here and let's start to finish this up into a bit of a proper skull .

You can see how quickly I can get an incredibly different face this way , leaving all my features alone , keeping them all very neutral and just adjusting the overall shape of the head .

And there we go , this one , we're gonna go with a very long shape like that .

And obviously no human that you ever see would ever have a face that's quite so strangely shaped .

But it is amazing how much you can get away with in cartooning , even in a very realistic style , I'm gonna have to bring his chin way down here for this one .

My ear will be way in here very close .

So here is gonna be , and this might take me a little bit further away from any kind of a character that would be usable for something realistic .

But I , I think I can get pretty far .

I'm gonna bring the nose down just a little bit more .

I think that was a little far up there just with the length of the head that was going a little bit too short .

My mouse here and it can be a lot of fun just to see how wild and how far away from standard norms you can get and still get a , a head that has some kind of believability to it .

And the great thing is once you've done this , it gets very easy to just repeat this .

I'm gonna make it just a little bit wider on the top .

He's so long on the top of the head .

If we bring that down just a little bit and bring it out in the back .

I think that's actually something that could be fairly useful going all the way to the top .

The way I had was far enough out that it would have to be pretty cartoony in order for it to work as it is , is still pushing the boundaries quite a bit .

I go with the head shape that is very , very square , let's do that .

So I want something kind of like that .

Brown knows mouth knows that just a bit halfway down .

It's gonna be my ear just right about here .

And maybe for a head like this , I'd want something that's much more angular for an ear just to keep the design kind of consistent .

That's kind of really a whole other concern , I guess .

Not really what we're talking about here .

Same basic standard nos and there's a very , very square broadhead that works .

And I can picture that as a character very , very easily and it's something that's very repeatable as you draw from different angles .

And so there you go .

And so now that we've done that , let's start to actually play with the features .

And so I'm gonna go back to my very standard , I'm gonna go with the same angle .

This is my standard head shape that I use all the time .

Very neutral .

My eyebrow line here , nose mouth chin will be just about here .

Center line in my ear comes right in here and that's a very standard head for me .

And now what we're gonna do is start to adjust the actual features and see what we can get .

And so I'm gonna go much larger with the nose and bring it out at the top too and give it a real ridge , my standard eye and I'm gonna leave everything else exactly neutral , my mouth , I'll leave exactly where it was .

So he's gonna have a very , very short distance between his nose and his mouth .

And obviously , that's something I could choose to adjust .

But for this case , I really want the focus to just be on a much larger , more pronounced nose .

So there we go , there's my , my basic head .

He has a much larger nose and that's a very repeatable character that you could draw as whichever character that you choose .

And you're a comic and it would be instantly recognizable .

I'm gonna draw the same one from the side , my ear , eyebrow line , my nose line , obviously , I went well below it , but that's the part that I altered .

And for the sake of getting my head defined in , I'm just drawing in my standard proportions .

Eye is here , nose will be here , it's my mouth chin and here's really my standard head from the side quickly sketched in this is an under drawing and I'm gonna go ahead and draw this nose on this face and we'll see just how different it can look without adjusting to any other features .

Lighten it down with a draw in my eye .

This time , I'm gonna bring this nose well out , bring it down quite a bit .

It's got a big nose , I'm gonna keep his lip where it was .

He's got a very short distance there .

So it's consistent with what I did here .

The rest of his features are my standard superhero face and there we go .

And that's a character that would be instantly recognizable to anybody as a completely different character than your standard , just by adjusting one feature .

And obviously , there are so many different ways that you can adjust your nose .

And I'm not gonna go into a million different variations of a nose before we move on here , but you can really shorten the length of the nose .

Let's just do that quickly .

Just by way of example , I'm gonna draw a very , very short nose and I'm sure that you can already visualize the change that this is gonna make to my face .

And so here's my eye , my other eye , I'm gonna go very sketchy with this one just so we can move belong here .

My mouth is here .

Very , very simple face and now I'm gonna draw a cartoonishly short nose .

There we go , a very , very different look and feel for the character looks like a completely different person .

And the only thing I've adjusted is the nose and I did it in a pretty extreme way .

You can do this much more subtly and get a range of characters and a range of features without having to adjust a great deal .

It's really , it's a lot like playing a video game and just moving sliders around .

All right .

So now I'm gonna draw a face , do the same head again .

I'm just gonna draw it the opposite way this time just for the sake of doing something a little bit different .

And we are going to adjust the eyes , get his ear drawn in and there's my standard head and I'm really gonna play with my brow .

And so I'm gonna give him a very , very pronounced brow .

And in order to do that , I'm gonna really need to adjust the overall shape of the forehead and bring it out quite a bit .

So he's got a very wide eyebrow and a very pronounced brow .

Next , we're gonna work on our mouth and a mouth is a place where you really can get quite a bit of character .

My mouth goes just about here .

Now , I'm gonna leave my mouth where it is , I'm not gonna bring it down or bring it up , but I think it's usually a little bit more effective to move the nose if you want the mouth to be far away from the nose then you're better off to shorten the nose , standard width for a mouth is right in line with the pupils just like this .

And so what I'm gonna do is bring it well past and I think as a result I need to give him just a little bit more jowl cheek , which I don't know .

So there , I kept the width of my lips the same for this one .

I didn't adjust anything just except for the width of the mouth .

And so I'm gonna give my character a very thin upper lip this time and a very big lower lip .

And you can see the effect that has this time .

I'm gonna make my mouth quite a bit wider with lips that are quite a bit larger .

And so I'm not increasing the width of my mouth .

I'm just increasing the height of my lips and that can have a pretty good effect on the appearance of your character .

I'm gonna do one more .

And for this one , I want to give him essentially no lips at all .

And that can really age a character quite a bit and make him look much more stern and severe .

So now that we've drawn some different head shapes and some different feature shapes and played with proportion , we're going to bring it all together and create some crazily caricatured faces .

And so I'm going to start with a shape like this , basically like a triangle , obviously drawing a face on a complete triangle .

Uh You're not gonna get something that is gonna be usable for any kind of a realistic picture , I guess .

If you're trying to do phin verb , you'll be , you'll be good .

All right .

So for this one , I'm gonna draw my brow here , my nose , I'm gonna bring way down .

Maybe that's a little too long , my mouth way down here and my eyes will be just about in here .

So I'm gonna give him a very long nose and I think I'll keep it really thin .

And so John and I here , so they're right here again , I'm not playing with the eyes too much .

Uh I can , I can wrinkle them so I'll draw some bags under the eyes .

That can be a really great way to add character to a face .

Um some wrinkles over the brow and let's give him a nose , make it very long and downward pointed and then for his mouth , I point that one down also very , very small chin because I've made him a little older .

I'm gonna continue that effect and give him some wrinkles along the face here , make him a little jowly just a bit because he's very thin .

Give him his ear maybe for this one , I'll extend his ears out , give him some big round ears , some hair and that's a great way to get that shape without giving them a really crazy odd looking uh head shape , which can be a little bit too far away for it to work as a cartoon as a , well as any kind of a realistic sort of a drawing .

Here's my other ear .

I'm gonna bring that one out nice and far too on a little loose just to keep moving .

And I wanna give him a very thin neck also because I'm bringing the whole thing down , you know , really like this and that's a character I can repeat from multiple different angles very , very easily and just bear in mind that I have an overall from the side .

Let's try and do this from the side .

And so this is kind of the shape that we're looking at here .

I've got my eyes here , my nose will be here , my mouth here , I'm gonna go along with the nose , my chin will be here , the center line here , my ear was is gonna be just about here .

I've got a pretty large ear and he needs to actually have a head that comes off of it .

And so it's gonna be something like that .

So my eye socket will be about here .

Let's draw an eye in here , give him his wrinkles around the eye and he's got a very long downward pointed nose , something like that .

His mouth comes down like this .

And I don't think you would really have much of a chin with this kind of a head shape .

And so I've given myself a character that I can draw over and over and he will look consistent and be readily identifiable as somebody that is very different than maybe your main protagonist .

Or you could make this your main protagonist , whichever you choose .

But there he is from the side .

And so we're gonna go with this shape this time and I'm not going all the way to a point with the top of his head because this is just not something I'd be able to use .

I'd have to cut it off in order to make it useful anyway .

So I'm gonna draw my brow line about here .

He's actually gonna have more head below his brow line than at the top .

Normally , I like to put this just about in the center , but because he's got such a large face , I'm gonna address that , make that even a little larger and my nose .

I think we'll give him a very short nose just like that .

My mouth will keep pretty high up here .

I want quite a bit of them from lower face here .

So I'm gonna draw my eyes in just to kind of establish my skull in here .

It gives me a good landmark to start to get everything and worked out in that shape .

I know my ears are gonna be just about here .

Maybe we give this one really small little ears just like that and I'll give him a , a project that I know I'll make it really short , but very blunt , you know what ?

I think I'll even bring this all the way out and give him a bit of a broken nose , heavily littered eyes and I'm making this up as I go along .

So it really could be just about anything you wanna do , just have fun with it .

People give them a really heavy brow and because he's got such a heavy brow , I wanna make sure to really accentuate that .

Then give me my mouse , you a wide mouth .

He got such a wide lower face .

I think a wide mouth will really work .

And I'm gonna make him fairly joy .

So I'll give him some lines around his mouth here .

I think with a very heavy face like that , generally speaking , you'd have more full cheeks and generally speaking , the face around the mouth drops quite a bit as you get older .

My chin will be just about here and then kind of pulls up around the chin just like that really .

And so it's a good shape to use when you want to add weight to a face .

And then I've got my overall weight under the face drawn in underneath that in his ear .

See just a hint of it on the other side could even have some fun with it and to drape his neck over .

So there's a very , very different kind of a face that I managed to achieve by using very small , very narrow eyes , a heavier , more projected brow .

I think we should draw this one from the side too just to get the real effect of , of what I'm doing for the brow and a very small and crooked nose , a wide mouth and a very large lower face .

And it has an overall design shape that's very , very obvious .

And so from the side , I can really draw the same shape .

Let's just do that .

Here's my brow , bringing that up just a little bit , making a mess , brings it up just about here .

My nose .

I want a short nose .

So it's gonna be here .

My mouth will be here , center is here , I'll put my ear right here .

He's got a small ear and I wanted him to have a very big brow .

So along my , so my eye line here , I'm gonna really recess that eye back quite a bit .

And so let's draw my eye in very small , very narrow eyed , a very narrow eye .

Give him a very heavy pronounced brow , fucking nose .

It's got a very wide mouth .

So I'm going well past the line where I would normally stop and I want to continue with this shape out here .

And so I've got his lip here , gonna bring his chin , way out , get my towel here , bring out the bat on the back of his neck here , pretty small ear .

And so there he is kind of from the side .

I want to make sure that that actually connects up and I'm missing this whole area here .

So let's fix that .

All right , for the next section , what I wanna do is take a character from reference and I'm gonna draw this entirely from reference for the first drawing and this is a very , very cartoony character and I'll leave an image of this so you can give it a try if you want to try this particular face .

So I've got my eyeline here .

My nose is just about here .

My mouth is here and my chin projects pretty far out .

This is a very , very cartoony face and far more cartoony than anything I would ever do .

But it makes for a really good experiment just to see how much I can get from this .

And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna draw the face from the angle in the picture first and see how well I can break it down .

And then what I wanna do is a couple of drawings from different angles and try and just make it work on my own and see what I can get from this and see if I can recreate this face accurately and really get a feel for it .

My mouth is about here , bring my jawline just down to about here .

Here is about here can slightly see the other ear here .

He's got it hair that comes up like this mustache like this and a hat .

I'm just sketch in his hat and by the way the top of his head , if it's shaped , basically like this and his eyes are here .

Well , the hat is just gonna conform to that shape just like this .

The brim is gonna come out wider from that like this and then the top of the hat like that .

So hats are fairly easy to draw , especially if they are flat out .

This way .

If you want to give it a little bit of shape , you , you would draw the center shape like this just like that .

And then the brim you can draw flat , get it working and once you have it working , you can give it a little shape , bring it up on the sides , maybe down in the front a little bit and give it a little .

So I'm , what I'm doing is giving it a shape like that , that's pretty loose , but it's really not the focus of what we're doing here .

So let me get his hat sketched in and now that we basically have something let's go ahead and draw on this and while this is really far away from anything , I would actually draw , it's amazing just how much you can add to your own artwork by trying something like this .

It's so far outside of what you would do and you can take elements from it .

I'm gonna be simplifying some of the shapes just a bit just for the sake of speed eye , it's gonna come up just like this .

It's got a very interesting nose shape really comes straight down and maybe even inward for a bit and then projects out like that .

And I'm not worrying about getting a final drawing that's really attractive .

What I wanna do is try and get something that describes the shapes for me best because this is an exercise and I want to internalize these shapes so I can hopefully draw this myself in his teeth .

basically go like this .

This job projects way out , drawing his ear , the other ear is just about here .

Airline , get his hat drawn in at the top here .

And so that's basically what we're working with right here .

That's gonna be his neck coming out of the back just like that .

And so that's basically the face that we're working with .

And now what I'm gonna try and do is take this really , really crazily proportioned face and see if I can turn it in space and draw it from different angles without looking at anything else and see how much I can get from it .

And I think it's a really great exercise .

So I'm gonna try and draw this face from the side and I'm seeing a shape and what I'm gonna do is break down the shape into a really simple form .

And it's basically like this , at least that's what I'm seeing .

It'd be very interesting actually to find this face , find another angle of the face and see just how close I can get just based on trying to break it down .

Myself , nose comes straight down my nose line is gonna be about here .

My mouth is gonna be about here .

Chin projects down from there .

My ear will be about here , bring the nose .

It's got a really pronounced shape .

Brow is gonna be just about here .

Got decently defined cheekbones , mouth .

He's not really smiling so much .

He's really kind of grimacing , see his bottom teeth coming out here and from here sketch in his ear and obviously I'll clean this up in just a minute , try and get something that is , his hair comes out like this , the top of his head would be here .

And so it's hot .

It's just gonna be about like this really crazy proportions for this face .

So let's clean this up and see what we get from it .

I'll try two more angles after this one .

When you're drawing your own work , you really don't want to be limited to the reference that you can find .

You want to be able to infer and interpret your reference .

And this is really the way I , I'm assuming that if you're a Disney animator , you would need to be able to break down these kinds of characters .

And I don't think this was Disney .

I'm pretty sure this would be a DreamWorks movie .

Don't quote me on that and my lip projects just about like this drawing the line from my hat .

And that's about what we're gonna get something like that .

Let's actually just do one more angle .

And then what I wanna do is see if I can take this face and interpret it in more of my own style and take some influence from it but not draw something that is quite so extreme .

My eyeline nose , my mouth wraps to my ear .

This would be and I think it can be maybe helpful to draw a proper head just to get the angle working something I'm a little more familiar with and see if I can interpret that shape on top of it .

And so my eyes are gonna be just about this .

They're very large eyes .

I might even be a little small , make these just a little larger .

My nose comes straight down and then projects well out from there from here , you'd be able to see the other side of the nose .

So you'd see a bit of a nostril in there .

My other eye is gonna be just about here , my brow , you'd see it just a little bit more underneath that brow and mouth .

It's gonna be just about like that .

And obviously , I'm gonna come pretty far down from here and have to bring that chin out .

This will be my teeth here .

But understanding my basic forms and being able to turn them in space like this means that I can take any kind of a face , make it my own very quickly and draw it from multiple angles and start to get comfortable with it very fast line for my hat will be just about like this .

You see the hat around his head just about like this , draw the top of the hat line for my hair gonna project out backwards like this .

And I haven't actually drawn into this mustache , I guess I should , but we'll just leave that alone .

And there's another example , I'm gonna leave this one loose so we can move on from a different angle and I think that works pretty well .

So I'm gonna go ahead and try and draw this face in my style using cues from , from this character .

So now I'm gonna go ahead and draw it's a basic three quarter , my mouth here , my ear is gonna come around to here , here's my forehead .

I'm drawing my basic head shape just as a starting point .

Now , what I'm gonna do is I know that I want his chin to be larger .

I'm not gonna go quite so crazy as the original .

So we'll just bring it out to about here .

I'm gonna bring my brows in about here , want him to have his wide crazed eyes , but I need to keep them more in line with proportion that a little more realistic , build this projects down like this , his nose .

I can actually really get away with cartooning quite a bit .

And so I'm gonna actually leave it very , very similar to what was in the original reference .

I can get away with that .

I think pretty effectively , his jaw is gonna be about like this or his cheeks .

Sorry if his brow , it basically takes about that angle right there .

Just like that .

Just getting our sketch in giving him a very large mouth , make his chin just a little bit larger .

I think it'll work .

The line for his hat will just be about here .

That's about where we wanna cut it .

If it were like a cross section , you would cut that plane just like that .

So I'm gonna place this brim up here on its ear .

And now from here , let's go ahead and clean this up just a little bit , come up with our final character because I've already drawn that character in the extreme kind of cartooning that he's , he's drawn in , in the original , I've really gotten a feel for it .

And so I've got eyes that are similarly working for me just in proper proportion or in more realistic proportion .

I shouldn't say proper , I mean , proper proportion is whatever you choose it to be as long as you're consistent .

He knows .

And I personally find this to be a lot of fun to do .

It's a great experiment .

It's very relaxing and you can get so much from it and it really gives you such a broad range of faces in styles very , very quickly .

And I think it's a great way to grow .

And so here his hat is brim , a little bit of a piece right here .

I'm gonna go ahead and lift the sides just a little bit drawing his hair and there's my character drawn really much more in my style .

And what I've done is taken design cues from the original and then just transfer them into something that's much more realistic and something a little bit more usable .

So he's got a jaw that projects out .

I could even probably go a little bit further and still keep it within a more realistic style .

But that's a choice .

You can kind of make , you can do a bit of a push and pull and see just how much you can get away with and make it work for the art that you're doing .

And I think that that works for me .

And really , I recommend that you try a lot of different animated characters , things that are really , really far out there and just really interesting designs and then draw them from different angles yourself , see how well you can do it and and how active you can be and then try and do it on your own .

I think it's a great , great experiment and we really , really help you develop your own caricatures and range of facial types .

Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video also tune in every Monday night at eight o'clock eastern for our Monday night draw live stream with MEREDITH and Dave .