May, 2024 | RapidFireArt

How to Draw a Face from the 3/4 VIEW (Loomis Method)

Drawing Tools

These are the tools I’m going to use. But feel free to use a regular school pencil (HB) for the entire tutorial.

- - Colored pencil for drawing construction lines
  - 4B graphite pencil for the finalized drawing

How to Draw a Face from the 3/4 View

Let’s start by drawing a circle for the cranium.

Next, draw a straight vertical line through the center of your circle and call it the Axis. This line determines how straight or how tilted your head will be. We will be using it as a reference for many steps throughout the rest of this tutorial.

Now draw a horizontal line through the center of your circle – This is where the eyebrows will be placed, so we’ll refer to it as the Brow Line. Make sure it’s perpendicular to the Axis.

Now we need to draw a straight line down the middle of the face. When the face is turned, this line curves. Imagine how a ball looks when you turn it slightly (observe how in the example above, the straight vertical line curves when I turn the ball left and right). To draw that curve correctly, we will draw an ellipse.

Make sure your ellipse is balanced evenly along the Axis so the facial features don’t end up looking wonky and lopsided. We’ll call this the Middle Line. The dotted half represents the side of the head facing away from our view. This dotted line helps make our 2D drawing look more 3D and helps us remember which side our head will be facing.

Above is an example of what to do and what not to do when drawing your ellipse. See how tilted the ellipse on the left is? It is not balanced well along the Axis.

It helps tremendously to have a physical model to rotate in your own hands, especially when drawing more difficult angles of the head! If you want to make a drawing reference tool like I’ve made for this tutorial, you can simply draw a vertical and horizontal line across any ball and pierce a stick through the north and south poles.

If you want to create your own drawing model, you’ll need the following materials:

- Toothpick
- Small ball (I used a styrofoam one, but you can also make one out of playdoh)
- Permanent Marker

The styrofoam ball represents the cranium and the toothpick is the axis upon which the head rotates. The orientation of the Axis determines whether the head will be straight or tilted and the degree of tilt. You’ll find the axis extremely important when you move on to drawing heads in tilted positions (such as the one in the 4th part of this series) because it will serve as your main reference point for properly aligning important parts of the face and head to prevent your drawing from looking skewed.

Okay, let’s get back to drawing!

So far, we’ve drawn a sphere, but the human head is not that round. The sides of the head should be quite flat, so we’ll need to slice 🔪 the side of our sphere off to reflect that.

Since we’re drawing a head from the 3/4 angle, we’ll only need to cut off one side (the visible side) of the sphere. To make sure we’re cutting off the right amount, split the sphere into 6 even spaces from top to bottom, using small tick marks.

Once you’re done, locate the topmost and bottommost tick, then extend the lines to the edge of your sphere. Make sure the lines are parallel to the Brow Line. With these two new lines, we now have boundaries to help us with the cut 🔪!

Using the boundary lines we just made, draw an ellipse that spans about half the sphere’s width. This ellipse represents the area of the sphere that we’re slicing off. We’ll call this area the Side Plane (side of the head).

Note: If you want to see what the side plane looks like from the front and side view of the head, please visit part 1 and part 2 of this drawing series.

Within the Side Plane, draw a vertical Ear Line. Make sure it’s parallel to the Axis.

Now let’s extend the Middle Line so it falls off the face of the sphere. Imagine a waterfall! Make it parallel to the axis or very slightly tapered.

Locate The Facial Features

Now let’s mark where his facial features will go! We can do this by making tick marks along the Middle Line. We have our Brow Line already, so we just need to find the Hair Line, Nose Line, and Chin Line.

The Hair Line and Nose Line are easy to find because they correspond to the top and bottom of the Side Plane.

You’ll notice that the space between each feature is equal. That means you can find where the Chin Line goes by simply measuring the distance from brow to nose to get the distance from nose to chin.

It’s important that these facial feature lines are parallel to the Brow Line.

Now let’s make this look more like a human head! Draw a curved line all the way from the forehead to the chin, creating the left edge of the face.

The jawline can be drawn by extending the ear line down and then angling your stroke towards the chin. I made my chin quite wide, but you can make it more narrow if you want, by adjusting the length of the Chin Line.

To make drawing the actual facial features less intimidating, section off the side of the face even further. I’ve drawn a curved line that stretches from the chin to the center of the side plane. You can lightly shade this entire right section of the head to clearly differentiate the side of his head from the front of his head.

There are two more facial feature lines to mark down…..the eyes and lips!

The eyes are about 1/3 of the way down from brow to nose.

For his lips, locate the halfway point between the nose and chin and draw a line that is slightly closer to the nose.

Construct the Neck and Base of The Skull

The front of his neck can be drawn right under the chin. Then draw the back of his neck. You’ll notice that I changed the shape of the cranium slightly so that the head looks less spherical.

Okay, we’re done with construction lines for now! Now we can have some fun drawing his actual facial features!

How to Draw Facial Features from the 3/4 View

Now I’m switching to a graphite pencil. Let’s draw his ear in the bottom right quadrant of the side plane, between the brow and nose. The ear should slant back slightly.

You can follow the numbered steps above and use this detailed tutorial if you need more guidance.

Now for the rest of his features…

To make the placement and drawing of facial features easier, you can familiarize yourself with the two things below. They will help you understand the human head and its features, not just from a fixed view like the 3/4 angle, but from any angle.

Human Skull: Understand the bone structure beneath all the skin, muscle, and fat so you know why and where to place bumps, ridges, etc.
Planar Head: A simplified version of the human head represented using flat sides or planes. Simplifying the head and face makes the placement and drawing of facial features easier and faster.

I’ve drawn some planes of the face (above), so you can see how helpful the planar head is. You can probably already visualize more clearly where each facial feature will go. Can you visualize where his eyebrows go? Let’s go ahead and draw those along the browline:

Notice how the tail of the right eyebrow ends roughly where the Side Plane starts.

Shape his forehead however you’d like while loosely following your construction lines. I’ve made his brow bone quite prominent.

It’s pretty difficult to draw a nose at this angle without any guidelines, so drawing a simple, planar nose first really helps (like the one I drew a few steps back in red). Try your best to balance your planar nose on the middle line so it sits on the face properly.

To draw the base of his nose, start in the center where the Middle Line and Nose Line intersect and draw towards the tip of the nose.
You can use your planar nose as a rough guide to draw the nose bridge. Extend your stroke to the brow.
Wrap your pencil strokes around the side of your planar guideline to create the nose wing
Then draw the nostril, which sits between the tip and wing of the nose.

Check out this tutorial for more detailed steps on drawing noses from the 3/4 view.

When viewing the nose from this angle, the nostril on the far side may not be seen at all.

Tip: If you want to study the nose from different angles, you don’t need any fancy tools, just grab some playdoh or a kneaded eraser. Create a wedge shape and add two round pieces on the side for each nostril. It’s a crude model, but it will give you a better sense of how a nose should look from different angles. Click here to watch my DIY tutorial on making a nose model.

Draw the far side of his face while visualizing the shape of his skull. The area near his eye is concave because of the way the eyesocket looks from this angle.

How prominent/high do you want to draw his cheekbone? You can adjust your stroke based on how you want his cheek to look. I’m not going any further down because I like to draw the lower portion after the mouth has been drawn.

To draw the right eye, create a vertical line that runs from the side of his nose wing, up to the Eye Line. The intersection marks where we should draw the inner corner of the right eye.

Tip: If you want to learn how to draw the eye from different angles, it helps to have a physical model to reference. make a simple model using a ball and some playdoh or a kneaded eraser. Flatten the playdoh, cut it in half, and wrap each half around the ball for the eyelids. Watch my DIY video for more details.

To draw the other eye, fit it in the space between the nose and the edge of the face. The inner corner of this eye will be hidden from our point of view behind the bridge of the nose.

Draw his lips along the Lip Line we created earlier. You can use the numbered steps above for guidance.

Start by drawing the corners of his mouth using ticks. The distance between these ticks will determine the width of his mouth. The size is up to you. I like to draw an imaginary vertical line down from the center of each eye and use that as a boundary line so the mouth doesn’t appear too wide.
To the left of the Middle line, draw a shallow curve.
Connect that curve to the corners of the mouth using wavy lines.
Draw the cupid’s bow (middle part of his top lip), making sure it’s positioned to the left of the Middle Line.
Connect the cupid’s bow to the corners of the mouth to complete the top lip.
Then draw the bottom lip. Position your stroke more to the left of the Middle Line.

Along the far side of his face, draw a convex curve next to the mouth. I’m still roughly following my construction lines. Outline his chin and jawline. I’ve given him a dimpled chin, but you can do whatever you prefer. For his neck, I’m staying pretty close to my construction lines.

How to Draw Hair From the 3/4 Angle

Let’s draw his hair!

How big do you want his forehead to be? You can use the blue Hair Line we drew during the construction phase as a reference to size his forehead – Draw your stroke below the line for a small forehead, above the line for a large forehead, or even higher for a receding hairline.

Work from the Middle Line and extend your strokes to either side of his head. As you work your way to the right, stop near the Side Plane, then bring your stroke down towards the end of his eyebrow. Before reaching the eyebrow, angle your stroke down to create his sideburn near the ear. Wrap the stroke around the top of his ear and continue down to the nape of his neck.

For the rest of his hair, try not to follow the sphere too closely, otherwise, the head will look too round and unnatural. At the very back of the head, angle your stroke inward so his head doesn’t look like a ball. If you want his hair to have lots of volume, put more space between the hair outline and the skull. You’ll notice that I’ve given him longer hair at the top/front of his head by adding more space between the hair outline and the skull.

How to Draw a Face from 3 quarter view Loomis Method

Once you’re satisfied with how your 3/4 face drawing looks, feel free to erase your construction lines and shade the face!