How to Block-In the Head (HYBRID Method)

hey guys here's a clip from Stephen Bauman's new blocking course that's now available on Proco Stephen is a master portrait artist and in this video he's showing off his hybrid method for blocking in the head if you like it check out the course at proco.com Bauman this is going to be part two in our hybrid series where we're combining together the best aspects of the visual approach and the best aspects of the structural approach to blocking in starting out obviously we want to establish the top and bottom of the drawing but there's going to be a little bit of a of a Twist Now by that I mean I'm not going to go carefully into the drawing as you may see me do quite frequently when I'm drawing for instructional purposes I'm going to dive straight in and I'm going to sketch this very much as I would if I were really drawing it only for myself that being said you're going to still see the same exact Concepts being expressed I'm going to be using straight lines so just be a little bit faster a little bit rougher a little bit looser than you're used to seeing me make now place the ear I place the head the next thing I want to do is actually find the brow Ridge now because I've placed the location of where I think the the top of the ear is which I think is a little bit above the kind of epicenter of the pose now you've seen me do this on several occasions in different approaches to to blocking in but I'm finding like an objective Center to the pose and I'm going to use that as like kind of a unit of measurement to understand like where other things would be so if I look at my source image and I find that same objective Center I can get an idea of where different features are going to be in relationship to that so for instance finding the top of the ear I find that it's a bit above that objective Center I'm going to go ahead and find that vertical Center Line now her head is turned a kind of three quarters to the left hand side and I want to use that vertical Center Line to indicate where that's happening and remember also from a depth perspective the back of the head here is really far in depth behind the front of the head here right these two Contours though they're on the flatness of the paper on the same level in a three-dimensional world one is way behind the other so we kind of have to to show as much as possible how we're going to get from this front plane here to the back plane here we're going to do that by curving and arcing that vertical center line for don't get distracted by the way by the part in the hair follow the features follow where her glabella is for instance I'm going to dial in glabella somewhere around here already we're starting to have a little bit a little bit of a recognizable head on the paper this is the goal when you're starting out what you want to do in these block ends is to be as simple and as blunt as possible to get something on the paper as quickly as possible that looks a little bit like a human let's not pin our hopes on on making a great Block in but just a decent one because everything that we do afterwards is going to hopefully work towards generating the success that we're looking for it's not that work in the first five minutes I'm not ready to indicate anything about the rest of the pose but I'm going to go ahead and put her neck onto the pose here just to see maybe where that might fall now that I have that all in place it's time to do a little bit of measuring remember how I've said that there's a ratio that you can work with when you're when you're making block ends or when you're drawing in general so try to create a ratio of maybe 70 to 30 where I'm drawing 70 of the time and I'm measuring maybe 30 of the time this is a good example of that right we get a template for the head on the paper and then we worry about kind of measuring everything out of paper I'm going to take a measurement for the height of the ear that I made because I feel like the the height of the ear and the height of the nose are not totally dissimilar from each other so I'm gonna speculate I'm gonna guess that the nose is down here where it hits the center line right about here I'm looking at my source image now and I'm measuring the length of the nose in relationship to the length that we find from the chin to the nose I think that if I look on my source image I find a relatively similar distance there so let's see what we find here yeah I think I've got too much chin on on my model actually I think I need to move this up and I'm going to go ahead and why don't we look at why don't we start to place the hairline as well as I think it's going to be a pretty major feature and I want to look and see from the brow Ridge to the hairline the top of the hairline I think that's a pretty similar distance I think that as I measure it on my source image it's a little bit less so that's going to wind up somewhere around here and that cuts across this temporal line that we find here Cuts right through it and you can see that the trajectory of that edge points more or less to kind of The Middle of the ear in fact it points to right where we would find the external auditory meatus which is the ear hole which as we all know that external auditory meatus is also the landmark that we use to help us discover the location of the zygomatic Arch that goes up to the plane shift and the zygomatic bone that essentially shows you where the the difference in between the major front plane of the face and the major side plane of the cheek meet up so we have a series of kind of connect the dots in terms of landmarks here that allows us to maybe make some hopefully quite prescient observations with our pencil hopefully in your drawings that you're working on right now you're starting to think about placing the features let's start to indicate that edge of the nose right so I think that we're going to find ourselves somewhere here I'm looking a little bit at that space on the left hand side of the face where we find the cheekbone that is going back in depth from comparing that to this also I know where the the bottom of the nose is but of course the plane shift between the top of the nose and the bottom of the nose is a little bit higher than than where the septum meets the front plane of the face eventually we're going to get quite quickly into a shadow shape and that's going to mean that we're going to be combining that structural information with visual information so effectively what I would like to do is not have to deal with going over that unnecessarily I think actually that I've got some things about the face a little bit too wide on this left-hand side I need to move them over which is precisely why you do work at this stage because you can make massive changes like that it doesn't really interrupt your drawing very much I still think I can probably lose a little bit off of the chin what I want to do as quickly as possible is get into a place where I'm not doing just one thing I'm going to be getting into a place where I'm working with Shadow and light and so that's going to mean that after I make just a series of observations maybe going around the Contour of the head I'm actually going to start to block in a little bit of Shadow and light and I'm going to mix that in with some of these structural information that I'm finding as well just comparing a little bit where the ear is in relationship to the bottom edge of the glabella and then also where the top of the brow Ridge on the left hand side is in relationship to the ear and there's that tilt to the brow Ridge the peak of the eyebrow on the right is also a good landmark even though it's not necessarily like a part of something structural it's a very strong visual landmark if you're not talking along with doing your drawing you should have more time available to you for measuring that can only be a good thing because this is the stage where I think measurements make the greatest possible impact as we get a little bit further along the drawing you should notice that just your natural sense of visual memory with your eyes starts to take over a bit and that we're not so focused just on this situation where we find ourselves measuring all of the time right you can see now we're looking at a pretty pretty objectively clear structural design for the head it's super rough there's a lot of things to do before we can call it a drawing but I would say that like that constructive period has maybe come to a close and I need to get into a place where I'm showing a little bit more value so that I'm not just working with a conceptual drawing I'm also working with drawing that has a visual resonance also at this moment we can bring the first phase of this hybrid style block and drawing to a close I want to point out what differentiates this from a purely structural approach there's two things really the first is how quickly we've gotten this structure down on the paper how simple it is but also how quickly we're going to move into adding Shadow and light to this structural template the sooner we get both kinds of information integrated into the drawing the sooner the hybrid approach will emerge and the strengths of that approach will make themselves apparent you can notice looking at the kinds of lines that I'm using to design the structures and forms of the head that straight lines are still integrated at this point eventually the drawing can go on to have fully expressed values and have ultimately very organic and refined volumes which don't necessarily need to show any angle breaks or straight lines we're still measuring we're still making triangulations and angle breaks still have a role to play in addition to that though what has changed is that the entire drawing has become a lot more volumetric through the use of multiple values both within the shadow but also within the light shape while you're observing the complexity of value expression here though I want you to also remember to squint down and take a look at actually how unified the shadow is versus the light shape and how within the light shape the halftone planes that have been used and applied are also unified versus the lighter halftone planes this kind of value structure and organization is fundamental to producing a very good hybrid approach to a block in thanks for watching remember this lesson is from Stephen Bauman's blocking course in his full course you'll learn more about the hybrid approach to blocking in but also two other methods these are all key techniques and principles that will help you learn how to draw accurate portraits check out the course now at progo.com bombing

Channel: Proko

Views: 294,302

Keywords: how to draw, portrait drawing, portraiture, blocking-in, pencil block-in, artist, artistic anatomy, draw people, art tutorial, drawing tutorial, learn to draw, art school, art class, art training, art blog, art vlog, drawing lesson, art lesson, learning art, stephen bauman

Id: K8z4NQMiFKM

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2023