How to draw a tilted head

A head tilted toward one shoulder looks hard to draw because every feature seems to move at once. It is easier than it looks. When a head leans sideways in front of you, nothing on the head changes shape: the whole face turns around the line between you and the nose, so the drawing is the upright drawing, turned on the page.

The figures here are from the tipping plates of our book How to Draw the Head (plates 22 and 23), drawn from one study head with its construction lines in red: the ball of the cranium, the center line, and the brow, eye, nose and mouth lines.

Draw the cross first, at the lean you see

Start with the ball of the cranium, then the cross of the center line and the brow line. Tilt the cross to match the head you are drawing and keep its two lines at right angles on the front of the ball. On the plates the brow line leans by exactly the angle of the tilt, 25 degrees here, because the head did not change, only its angle on the page did.

Everything else hangs on that cross. The eye, nose and mouth lines stay parallel to the brow line, so they all lean by the same amount. The features sit along the center line at the same spacing as on the upright head. The ears follow the center line's lean, so the ear on the low side drops and the one on the high side rises.

The most common mistake is to draw the features level and only lean the outline. Then the eyes sit at one angle and the jaw at another, and the face looks sheared rather than tilted. Measure the lean of the brow, then line the eyes and the corners of the mouth up with it.

At three quarters

A head can turn and tilt at the same time. Build the turn first, as in the three-quarter view guide: the center line moves toward the far side of the ball and the feature lines start to wrap around it. Then lean the whole construction. The turn decides where the center line sits on the ball, and the tilt decides how far the cross leans on the page.

In profile, a tilt becomes a nod

In profile you look at the head from the side, along the line from ear to ear. Turning that drawing on the page is the same movement as the head nodding, so the two figures below show a head looking up and a head looking down.

The feature lines stay parallel and the ear stays between the brow and nose lines, wherever the face points. So for a head looking up or down in profile, draw the level profile's lines at the new angle and place the features on them, rather than redrawing the face.

These plates turn the whole drawing, neck included, because they turn the view. On a person the neck stays over the shoulders and bends at the top. Draw the neck up from the shoulders and set the head on it at the angle of the cross.

Tilted and seen from above or below

Most heads you draw are a little above or below your eye level and leaning at once. Take the two questions one at a time. The lean of the cross tells you the tilt. The curve of the brow, eye and nose lines along that cross tells you the height: from above they curve toward the chin, from below toward the crown, whichever way the head leans. The head from above and head from below guides cover those curves on level heads.

A quick exercise

1. Draw an upright head from the front, with the cross and the feature lines.
2. Next to it, draw a ball and a cross leaning about 25 degrees.
3. Copy the feature lines onto the leaning cross at the same spacing, parallel to the brow line.
4. Place the eyes, nose, mouth and ears on those lines.
5. Turn your paper until the second cross is upright and compare the two faces. If they match, the tilt is right.
6. Repeat with a profile, turning it to look up and then down.

Step 5 works on any tilted drawing: turn the page until the cross stands upright, and any feature you placed level instead of on the lean will stand out.

The full set of tipping plates, with the three other study heads tilted from above and below, is in How to Draw the Head, the book that comes with Head rotation volume 1, volume 2 and the head library.

This guide is one step in how to draw the head at any angle, which puts all the head guides in order.