Forehead too short, hairline too low
“The subject looks like they have a cramped face with a squashed skull cap.”
What is happening
The hairline is drawn far too close to the eyebrows, reducing the forehead to a narrow strip. This distorts the thirds of the face and gives the head a compressed, ape-like appearance.
When drawing hair, artists frequently place the hairline where they feel the top of the head ought to begin, neglecting the actual cranial volume of the frontal bone. Hair grows from a defined boundary that sits well down from the crown, but still a full third of the facial height above the brows.
The 30-second test
Measure with a pencil: check if the distance from the chin to the nose base matches the nose base to brow, and whether that same length matches the brow to hairline.
How to fix it
- Mark the standard thirds of the face: chin to nose base, nose base to brow line.
- Project that exact same distance upward from the brow to locate the true natural hairline.
- Erase the old hairline and any premature hair shading that crept down into the forehead space.
- Redraw the boundary of the hairline, leaving a clean, broad forehead plane.
- Build the bulk of the hair upward and outward from the corrected hairline.
Can it be saved? Rescue
Erase the lower hair marks back to the correct hairline position and lightly blend the forehead skin tone across the cleared paper.
Drill: Rule of Thirds Mapping
About 10 minutes. You need:
- Reference photos
- tracing paper or sketchbook
- pencil
Find three head-and-shoulders portraits. Measure and divide each face into equal vertical thirds (chin, nose base, brow, hairline) to train your eye to recognise forehead proportion.
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.