The planes of the head and how light falls on them

A head is round, but drawing it as round makes it hard to shade. The planes approach simplifies the head into a small number of flat faces, each one tilted a different way. A flat face is easy to light: it is either turned toward the light or away from it. Once you know where those faces meet, you know where the shadow edges go.

The hard-plane head in our reference is built around these turns, and the shadow shapes on it follow them.

The four big planes

Start with the largest divisions before any feature.

1. The front. The forehead, the front of the cheeks and the chin face forward. On a three-quarter view they form one long, slightly bent surface down the face.
2. The side. From the temple to the jaw corner, the head turns to face sideways. This is the plane the ear sits on, and it is usually the largest single plane on a turned head.
3. The top. The cranium curves over from the forehead toward the back. Treat it as one gentle dome, and give it an edge along the temple line where it meets the side.
4. The underside. Under the jaw, the head turns to face down toward the neck. It is easy to forget because it is often in shadow, but it is the plane that separates the head from the neck.

The edge between the front and the side runs from the outer corner of the brow, down over the cheekbone, to the jaw corner. That line is the most useful one on the head. It is where shadow begins when the light comes from the front and the side at once.

The smaller planes on the face

Inside the front plane, a few smaller turns carry the features.

• The brow ridge is a shelf. Its top faces up and forward, and its underside faces down into the eye socket.
• The eye sockets sit under that shelf, one on each side of the bridge of the nose.
• The nose is a wedge: a top plane down the bridge, two side planes, and an underside where the nostrils are.
• The cheekbone is where the front plane of the cheek turns into the side plane. On a gaunt face, a hollow sits below it.
• The muzzle, the curved area around the mouth, sits forward of the cheeks and wraps around the teeth.
• The chin has its own front plane and a small underside.

You don't need to memorize a fixed map of these. On any head, find where the surface changes direction and give each change a plane.

Watch the planes under one moving light

The test of a plane is whether it changes value as a unit when the light moves. Our head lighting reference shows the same hard-plane head at a 45-degree turn under eight lights, and it's easiest to read the frames in pairs.

In the frame above, the front of the face is lit and the side plane goes dark, starting at the turn below the cheekbone. Small dark shapes sit under the brow, the nose and the lower lip, because those are undersides turned away from the light.

Here the light has moved behind the head. The same edge, in front of the ear and down the cheek, still divides light from shadow, only the other way round, because these two lights sit on opposite sides of that turn. Other frames put the edge on other turns: a raking light from the face side leaves only the front planes of the brow, cheekbone, nose and chin lit. The edge moves, but the places it can land stay put. A shadow edge falls on a turn between planes, or it is a cast shadow, like the ones under the brow and the nose. If an edge in your drawing crosses the middle of a plane and nothing above it casts that shadow, the plane is probably in the wrong place.

Draw the planes before the features

1. Block in the cranium and the jaw as usual.
2. Draw the edge between the front and the side, from the brow corner over the cheekbone to the jaw corner.
3. Draw the line under the jaw where the underside begins.
4. Add the brow shelf, the nose wedge and the chin as small boxes on the front plane.
5. Choose one light direction and fill every plane facing away from it with one flat tone.

Only then add the eyes, lips and ears. If the flat-tone version already reads as a head turned in space, the features will sit on it. If it doesn't, more detail won't fix it. How to shade a head, one light at a time takes this flat-tone pass further on the same eight frames. How sharp the edge between two planes is decides how angular a face looks; how to draw an angular face measures it on this head against a smoother one.

The hard-plane head shown here is Study Pack 01, and its page in the free library is the hard-plane head. The eight lit frames come from the head lighting reference, volume 1.

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