Eyes placed too high on the head
“My portrait looks like an alien or a child because the forehead is tiny and the chin is huge.”
What is happening
The eyes are placed well above the vertical midpoint of the skull. This leaves almost no room for the forehead and hairline, while stretching the lower half of the face unnaturally.
The human brain prioritises facial features over bare skull mass. Beginners instinctively measure from the chin to the hairline rather than from the chin to the top of the cranium, forgetting the volume of skull covered by hair. In a standard adult head, the eyes sit roughly halfway between the chin and the top of the skull.
The 30-second test
Hold a pencil vertically with your thumb marking the distance from the chin to the inner corner of the eye, then compare that length against the distance from the eye to the very top of the head.
How to fix it
- Erase the current eye line, eyebrows, and bridge of the nose.
- Measure the full height of the head from the bottom of the chin to the crown of the cranium.
- Make a faint mark exactly halfway down that total height.
- Redraw the line of the eyes across this new halfway mark.
- Re-align the nose and mouth using the new eye level as your anchor.
Can it be saved? Partly
If drawn lightly in graphite, lift the eyes with a kneaded putty rubber and drop them to the true midpoint. If heavily shaded or indented into the paper, restart on fresh paper.
Drill: Cranium Halving Drills
About 10 minutes. You need:
- A4 cartridge paper
- 2B pencil
- ruler
Draw four blank ovals of equal size. Using a ruler, mark the exact vertical midpoint on each oval. Sketch simple eye lines on the midpoints, adding hair volume above to internalise how much space sits over the eyes.
Background reading
General teaching sites on this subject. They are a reading list, not page-level citations for this advice.
The advice is a generated synthesis of common teaching practice and has not been checked line by line against any source; treat times and difficulty as estimates.