Rotating the Anterior View of a Skull into the Frankfort Horizontal Plane for Postmortem Drawing

Published in the Journal of Forensic Identification, Vol. 65 No. 5 September/October 2015

I wrote this article to assist other artists in drawing postmortem images when they had only anterior photos taken at poor angles to work with. Often, the photos taken at the scene or at the ME’s office aren’t taken with the artist in mind. They’re often taken from the side of the victim or at an angle. They’re not ideal to work with when trying to draw the victim with correct proportions. I came up with this method of turning the head to the profile and then into the Frankfort Horizontal to attempt to compensate for the inadequacies of the photograph and come up with the correct proportions for the anterior view. It may not work in all cases, but I thought it might help artists with some problematic cases.