Dragons - Heads

This tutorial will show you how to put together some guidelines to help you draw dragon heads. Feel free to skip this part about side views if you're more interested in drawing front views.

First, we'll start with a big ellipse of some kind which is the main part of the dragon's head. From this, you can add a snout of any size or shape you desire - experiment with different snout shapes until you find one that suits your dragon!

From here, you can sketch in a circle to represent the jaw of the dragon and another above that for it's brow, which will end where the snout begins. You can add an eye and mouth at this point.

At this point, I add the dragon's neck. Make sure the back of the neck starts at the top of the skull (it's easy to make it start too high or too low if you've drawn the horns first and don't sketch your neck or the top of your dragon's head through them) and that curves in the neck are smooth rather than sudden and awkward. The throat-side of the neck will start under the jaw somewhere and will be roughly parallel to the opposite neck line. There can be variation in this, like the throat area just under the jaw being a bit wider, or the neck getting slightly wider the closer it gets to the body, but be careful about width extremes or getting wider or smaller in awkward places.

The horns and other facial decorations are generally the last things I add to my dragons because I find that they get in the way while I'm drawing the rest of the head and it's easier to connect things to the dragon's head in believable ways if the head is already fully drawn.

But yes! Horns can come in many shapes and sizes, but I'm just drawing the most basic and expected of horn shapes here! The horns will start somewhere behind the dragon's brow and the bottom line will connect somewhere above the lower jaw. If it was thicker than that, the dragon wouldn't be able to move its lower jaw, and that wouldn't be any good! If you want more pairs of horns lower on the dragon's head, they can connect to the lower jaw and therefore move with it when it opens its mouth.

Here is the inked version of the head. I've added a little hole where the upper and lower jaws connect which is the dragon's ear hole! If you want to add ears to your dragon, this is where they would connect to its head.

Tip: If you look at skulls of other creatures like cats, dogs, birds, etc., their ear holes are all in that area where the upper and lower jaws connect. It might not look seem that way based on the positions of their outer ears, but those outer ears do actually lead to those holes!

Instead of showing a coloured version of the dragon, here's what the skeletal structure might be like. I've not studied skeletons enough to do this particularly accurately, but this might give you a vague idea of what's going on inside the dragon to give it its shape anyway. The horns have been omitted to show the shape of the head better.