Mentalis, a pair of muscles toward the center of your chin that helps control your lower lip.Levator labii superioris alaeque nasi, which can open your nostrils and lift your upper lip.Depressor labii inferioris, a muscle in your chin that helps control movement in your lower lip.Depressor anguli oris, which is on each side of your chin and works with other muscles to produce a frown.Corrugator supercilii, which is near the eyebrow and enables frowning.Auriculars, which allow some people to move their ears.Temporalis, a fan-shaped muscle that helps your jaw close.Medial pterygoid, a thick muscle that helps your jaw close.Masseter, a muscle that runs from each cheek to each side of your jaw and helps your jaw close.Lateral pterygoid, a fan-shaped muscle that helps your jaw open.Buccinator, a thin muscle in your cheek that holds each cheek toward your teeth. The facial muscles involved in chewing are: Making facial expressions, such as smiling, pouting or raising your eyebrows in surprise.Your facial muscles are responsible for two major tasks: The human skull is an amazing piece of evolutionary design, and it’s a design that every serious artist should know backwards and forwards.īy the way, the images in this post are all high res and free for you to use as reference, thanks to my good friends at UB Productions.What is the purpose of the muscles of your face? For the artist, there is beauty to be found where most others see only death. When it comes right down to it, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. The sutures of the skull are actually fractals, and measuring fractals is best left to the mathematician. You could try using a piece of thread and match the wiggly zig-zags as close as possible, and then straighten and measure the thread, but even then, if you look at those sutures through a microscope, you would find you missed a ton of them. You could use a measuring tape to get a straight line length from one point to another, but that measure wouldn’t account for all of those tiny little wiggles. I wish I could tell you exactly how long they are, but it turns out they are impossible to measure accurately. You know those wiggly little lines between the bones of the skull? Those are called sutures, and they are ridiculously long! They may not look it, but they are. By the way, the skulls you see most often are of Asian descent, since most anatomical specimens come from that part of the world.ĥ. A trained artist, anatomist, or anthropologist can tell the difference in a single glance. While we all have the same 22 bones in our skulls, their size and shape are different depending on sex and racial heritage. Human skulls look different depending on if they are male or female, and depending on what part of the world they come from Without those bottom two bones, the brain case becomes the skull cap.Ĥ. But when anatomists study the calvaria, or skull cap, they don’t consider the ethmoid or sphenoid bones, which close up the base of the skull. These bones fuse together to make the case that encloses and protects the brain. In anatomical terms, the brain case includes these bones: There is a difference between the skull cap and the brain case The largest hole in the skull is where the vertebral column joins the base of the skull, and is called the foramen magnum. These openings allow for the passage of the nerves and blood vessels that innervate the face. Eight bones make up the cranium, and 14 bones make up the facial skeleton, but the teeth are not considered to be bones of the skull.īesides your peeper holes, your smellin’ hole, and your pie hole, the skull is full of tiny holes called foramina. The bones of the skull are divided into two main groups: the bones of the cranium, and the bones of the face. Teeth are not considered to be bones of the skull So in the spirit of the holiday, I bring you 5 weird facts you probably didn’t know about the most important feature of the human anatomy, the human skull. The bones of the skull shape the features of our characters and hold the muscles that create the subtle facial expressions that bring our drawings to life. From renaissance vanity paintings to modern day tattoo art, images of the skull remind us that life is short and the time to live our dreams is now.įor an artist working today, understanding how to draw the human skull is no less important than it was centuries ago. For centuries, artists have been captivated by the human skull.
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