Turning Heads: Learn Facial Anatomy & Create an Animation of a Head Turn

This four week course is dedicated to the thorough study of the human head in motion. How do facial features get repositioned and even distorted with the change of either face’s angle or the point of view? To understand that, we will start with the anatomy of the skull and depict it from several viewpoints. It will help us construct the head in multiple positions and build accurate facial structure. We will work from observation by turning the model’s head up and down, left and right, etc., to render their face in perspective. Using our sketchbook and a pencil (and later, some colored pencils as well) we will create a number of studies to learn how to deal with the awkward angles of the face.

The goal is to produce a handmade animation strip, making it look like the face is moving. At the end, you’ll turn your drawings into an actual animation.