Here's the whole idea in one breath: on almost every human head, the eyes sit about halfway down — and yet, asked to draw a face, nearly everyone puts them far too high. Once you've seen why, you can never quite un-see it, and your faces stop looking like they've got tiny foreheads and enormous chins.
Start with Your Own First Guess
Ask anyone to quickly sketch a face and watch where the eyes land: up near the top, with a thin strip of forehead above and a great expanse of cheek and chin below. It feels right while you're drawing it. Then hold a photo up to the page and the truth is awkward — the real eyes are miles lower, right around the middle of the whole head. You weren't being careless. Your brain set you up.
The reason is that we don't really look at heads — we look at features. Eyes, nose, mouth: that's where all the meaning lives, that's the bit we read for who someone is and how they feel. So when we picture a face we picture the busy front of it and quietly forget the great smooth dome of skull sitting above the eyebrows. We mentally lop the cranium off, cram all the features into what's left, and the eyes drift up to the top. Knowing the dome is there is half the battle.
Why "average" Is a Gift, Not a Cage
This isn't an art rule someone invented; it's just how human skulls are built, and it holds for almost everyone — kids, adults, every face on the bus. That's enormously useful: it means you start every portrait from the same honest scaffold instead of guessing from scratch. The averages are a map of the typical head, and the whole craft is learning that map well enough that, later, you can mark exactly where a real person wanders off it.
In the toy, drag the eye line to where you think the eyes belong, lock in your guess, then reveal the true halfway line. Most first guesses sit well above it — proof, in your own hand, that the skull up top is real and your brain keeps cropping it out.