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Head Design Tutorial

Written by Stephen Hinds

1. Blocking In

First, you start off with a basic shape for the head and hair. Then indicate where you plan to put your mouth, eyes and nose. I used a shape to indicate the eye sockets to place the eyes in later. By doing this, it gives a sense of depth to the eyes so it feels like they are embedded into the skull.

Adding mouth corners indicates how wide the mouth will be. They are usually the darkest areas of the mouth. You might see this technique used a lot with comic book characters.

2.  Blocking in secondary shapes

The next step is to start placing secondary shapes, such as nostrils, the eyeballs, and  irises. I then used the white paint to cut away at the hair, bringing down its size, and reshaped it a bit more to fit the head.

Always put in a shadow shape under the chin, just to differentiate the shapes from one another, with it you can keep an eye on your values.  Painting in black and white will help you with your grey scale and colour values, when you use colours for your actual painting. It’s a form of pre-planning.

3.  Refining stage

Now you can start refining details as soon as you have blocked in as much information as you need to move forward. Always work on your painting as a whole, so you can focus on the big picture, rather than spending 1 hour refining an eye. Flip your canvas occasionally to check your proportions. Take a break and come back to your painting and look it over before starting again, or get another pair of eyes such as a friend to look over it - one who has artistic ability and can spot mistakes.

4. Finished!

I just made some minor adjustments. Refined the hair, and added highlights to certain areas. Then I took some color from his skin and faded his eyebrows a little.

I hope this tutorial was somewhat helpful. It’s usually a step by step process that leads to a good painting.