The Digital Ninja Tutorial Series :
Illustrate Like a Pro : Head Basics !

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Time once again for a ninja lesson. This
time around we are going to go through the basics
of the human head. Now keep in mind this is just
crash course and we will go further into head shape
specifics for the male and female later.

Required Ninja Gear:
Materials you will need for this tutorial.

1. A Pencil and Eraser (WOooHoo a cheap tutorial !)

Intro : Ok this will be a pretty short tutorial. You can
practice the head on a scrap peice of paper.

Sections :
1. The basic head ( components )
2. Feature spacing : Eye, Nose, Mouth
3. Ears
4. Eye Proportion

Step 1. The basic head ( components )

Here we have the basic Head shape. Now I have boken the head into three main sections for you to follow. 1. Cranial Mass : I.E. the brain, hehe. This part of the head form takes up the most space as you can probably see. This portion will contain the Hair, Forehead, Ears, and Nose compononents ( more on that later ). An easy shape to start off with when creating this section is a simple circle. This will take up about 2/3 's of the head space so try and keep the proportions correct. 2. The Jaw Line : Simple enough, the jaw line is the lower half of the head structure and will contain the mouth and chin. This will utilize the remaining 1/3 of the head. The Jaw line's shape will vary vastly depending on the gender and size of your specific character, so it's up to you on how big you want it to be. I used a simple trapazoid for the the jaw line and just flipped it upside down, you will come to find that the various jaw lines you create can range from upside down traingles, to full squares depending on your character, so keep that in mind. 3. The Chin : This is just the basic bottom of the chin. This is just the bottom outline of the chin but it will give you a good idea of where the bottom of your head will end.

Some things to remember :

When you first draw the head, just worry about the outline.
Eye, nose and mouth placement will not look to well
if your outline is messed up to begin with.

Now lets move on to " Feature spacing : Eye, Nose, Mouth "

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