A FEW TILTED HEADS

 Look at this wonderful sketch by Harvey Dunn:

It's so broad and loose, it almost could've been painted with his elbows.  Yet look at the subtle way Dunn captures the tilt of the woman's head, leaning backward and looking up.  She has no facial features but her hairline gives us all the information we need. The tilt of her head is complemented by the man's head, leaning in. 

Dunn strategically places both heads above the horizon line, so the contrast against the white background leads us right to the heart of the painting.   Elbows or not, Dunn has performed microsurgery in this sketch.

Next, check out this sketch by Austin Briggs.

It might've been drawn with a cigar butt.  There are no details, no eyelashes or buttons or shoelaces yet Briggs has perfectly captured the hang of the man's head, and that's enough to shape the whole character of the drawing.

You'd need a micrometer to measure the swell of his cheek, yet Briggs has it absolutely perfect.

Here, Norman Rockwell tells a story using eleven bent necks and one ramrod straight:

 

More nuanced, look at what Rockwell achieves by gently tilting the heads of these young girls. 

On the way home from a birthday party, a girl senses that a boy is mustering the courage to sneak a first kiss:

 

When the vedic deity Twashtri invented girls he combined the trembling of grass, the slenderness of the reed, the bloom of flowers, the glances of deer, and the gaiety of sunbeams. One gets the feeling Rockwell used a similar recipe.

My point is that today we've lost some of the highs and lows in a draftsman's repertoire.  You'll often see today's artists use necks as a straight vertical platform for the head.  But in previous years we see necks as one in a more rich and complex field of communication tools.