Head drawn too narrow or too round
“The head I drew looks like a balloon or a squash, totally distorted in width.”
What is happening
The overall silhouette of the head is either overly spherical or compressed sideways into a tall, flat oval. As a result, the facial features appear either pinched together or widely scattered across flat space.
Beginners often start with a simple circle or oval without establishing the relationship between the cranial ball and the narrower jaw structure. When working with pencil or charcoal, drawing features first and fitting the skull boundary around them later almost always leads to incorrect overall width.
The 30-second test
Measure the width of the head at cheekbone level against the total height of the head; the width should typically be about two-thirds of the total height.
How to fix it
- Lightly block out the outer boundary of the head with four straight guidelines: top, bottom, and side limits.
- Check that the width across the temples is roughly two-thirds of the total height.
- Shave down or expand the cranial mass using soft charcoal or a pencil edge to establish the proper oval.
- Trim down the jaw line to ensure it tapers inward from the wider cranial mass.
- Adjust the outer ears and hair contours to fit the corrected skull boundary.
Can it be saved? Rescue
Adjust the outer contours of the hair and jawline with an eraser, redrawing the outer envelope without having to move the interior features.
Drill: Head Width Box Framing
About 15 minutes. You need:
- Newsprint pad
- vine charcoal
- kneaded eraser
Draw three rectangles with a 3:2 height-to-width proportion. Fit simplified head masses inside each box, ensuring the cheekbones hit the side walls while the jaw narrows beneath. Repeat until the ratio feels automatic.
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.