07-15-2015, 05:12 AM
Looks good, man!
On the subject of drawing heads and faces I'd like to make a bit of a radical and blasphemous suggestion. I'm seeing that you're using the Loomis method to construct your head studies and I am going to try and persuade you to stop.
Now I'm going to suggest something weird and this is something I've learned from a bunch of life drawing. Construct backwards. That sounds weird but hear me out.
When you draw from life, the first things you want to do is to get an accurate block out of the subject. You disregard anatomy, form, value and all that and you look at what you're drawing/painting as a flat 2D surface. You use straight lines and draw the contours of the subject, trying to be as accurate as possible. You use negative shape, relative angles, plum lines and whatever you need to get this part right. Then you move on to finding the important landmarks. When drawing the face, this is often the ears, the jaw, a line through the bridge of the nose to the centre of the lip, bottom of the nose, the brow line and the line defining the side plane of the face.
From that point you can start to construct your drawing based on the subject. You have to let your subject dictate the method and drawing rather than the method dictating the drawing. This is why I find the Loomis method so detrimental to drawing from life. Starting with a ball is too vague and you don't define anything valuable by starting this way. Bridgman's block is a lot more appropriate however it's more a way of thinking rather than actually drawing. Draw what you see and then construct after the initial contour drawing is finished.
If you can find some of Bridgman's life drawings of heads, they aren't constructed from a block, rather he uses the block as a metaphor to explain the concept of head planes. He uses the method I describe however it isn't conveyed very well in his books. I think he assumed that artists would have learned to draw from life first so he could just focus on abstracting the head.
For me, this method helped me a lot when it came time to drawing from imagination. It let me learn to think of the head and face in a more versatile way.
Anyway, disregard this if it doesn't make sense. I'd suggest you try it but in the end you should do what works for you!
On the subject of drawing heads and faces I'd like to make a bit of a radical and blasphemous suggestion. I'm seeing that you're using the Loomis method to construct your head studies and I am going to try and persuade you to stop.
Now I'm going to suggest something weird and this is something I've learned from a bunch of life drawing. Construct backwards. That sounds weird but hear me out.
When you draw from life, the first things you want to do is to get an accurate block out of the subject. You disregard anatomy, form, value and all that and you look at what you're drawing/painting as a flat 2D surface. You use straight lines and draw the contours of the subject, trying to be as accurate as possible. You use negative shape, relative angles, plum lines and whatever you need to get this part right. Then you move on to finding the important landmarks. When drawing the face, this is often the ears, the jaw, a line through the bridge of the nose to the centre of the lip, bottom of the nose, the brow line and the line defining the side plane of the face.
From that point you can start to construct your drawing based on the subject. You have to let your subject dictate the method and drawing rather than the method dictating the drawing. This is why I find the Loomis method so detrimental to drawing from life. Starting with a ball is too vague and you don't define anything valuable by starting this way. Bridgman's block is a lot more appropriate however it's more a way of thinking rather than actually drawing. Draw what you see and then construct after the initial contour drawing is finished.
If you can find some of Bridgman's life drawings of heads, they aren't constructed from a block, rather he uses the block as a metaphor to explain the concept of head planes. He uses the method I describe however it isn't conveyed very well in his books. I think he assumed that artists would have learned to draw from life first so he could just focus on abstracting the head.
For me, this method helped me a lot when it came time to drawing from imagination. It let me learn to think of the head and face in a more versatile way.
Anyway, disregard this if it doesn't make sense. I'd suggest you try it but in the end you should do what works for you!
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