Guides · Heads
Head Looking Down: Reference Photos and What Changes
Reference photos of a head looking down: the chin lowered between thirty and seventy degrees, the face turned toward the camera. Open the same search in Angle Ref to turn the angle yourself.
Yassin mer, Unsplash License kabita Darlami, Unsplash License 
Miguel Discart & Kiri Karma (Photos Vrac), CC BY-SA Kate Townsend, Unsplash License Babak Eshaghian, Unsplash License Blake Wisz, Unsplash License Soweto Graphics, Unsplash License 
Miguel Discart & Kiri Karma (Photos Vrac), CC BY-SA Pradnyal Gandhi, Unsplash License Efren Barahona, Unsplash License Conner Jordan, Unsplash License 
garryknight, CC BY
What changes at this angle
- More of the top of the head shows, and the crown or the hair parting comes into view.
- The ears sit higher than the eyes, with the ear tops rising above the brows.
- On a closed, neutral mouth the mouth line curves downward in the middle, with the corners sitting higher than the centre.
- The nostril openings disappear and the nose reads as a solid shape whose lowest point is the tip.
- The forehead takes up more of the face and reads longer than the stretch from the brows to the base of the nose.
- More of the upper eyelid shows between the brow and the lashes.
What goes wrong
- Starting the drawing at the hairline and leaving nothing above it, so the head reads as a face with no skull behind it, flat as a mask.
- Copying the ear height from a level portrait, so the ears read too low on the skull and the bowed head looks squashed instead of tilted.
- Drawing the mouth as a level line, so the lower face looks flat and the head reads level.
- Keeping the forehead, nose and lower face as equal thirds, so the drawing reads as a top view of the hair stuck over a front view of the face.
Try it
Open the same angle in the head search and turn the skull to see the full set of results.