How to Draw Facial Features | Understanding the Loomis Method Part II

what's up i know it's been a minute this is my last upload but we're back at it i'm going to be uploading a lot more frequently um that i have not been the last couple months starting with uh this one a sketch of michelangelo's david arguably one of the most famous sculptures in the whole art world so for those of you that have been following this is a follow-up part two to understanding the loomis method uh before in that video i was going through and i was drawing a whole bunch of different luminous heads from all sorts of different angles this is the post to that and i'm going to be using an actual reference of monsieur david and we're going to be using the reference to draw our sketch so you'll learn how to draw the initial circle uh to establish the basis of the head and then i'm going to be showing you how to easily draw the three main sections of the face and then how i bring out the planes of the face you know as far as um like the eye sockets and you know the nose are concerned and then from there it's basically going to be an array of low value building various degrees of pressure control we're also going to be going over line work you know to help make the eyes pop and bring out features such as the nose and mouth and of course shading you know i'll be going over some shading tricks as well and you know overall it should be fairly comprehensive now before we start be sure to like subscribe and turn on all of your notifications so that you never miss when our latest and greatest videos hit the channel grab your pencils and let's get back into it [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so first and foremost i'm going to be using one of my favorite tools this year's simple compass to put down the circle which is the first shape that we need to get this portrait started i mean you can also freehand your circles if you wish but i find that the compass works for me and gives me a good foundation to work with when it comes to placing my lines so so now that i have the circle established what i can do is i can punch in my side plane here and then i have my vertical axis and then i have my horizontal axis here so i've effectively created four quadrants for the side of the head and then i like to go off the top and this basically establishes the plane of the temple and then i like to run another line from my horizontal axis and that creates the plane of the cheek and then here we're just doing the top line for the forehead the middle line for the top of the eyes or the brow line as some call it and then the bottom line to establish the bottom of the nose and then i'm just going to continue to pull this line down here on my vertical axis and pull it over and that's going to give me a good idea of the structure of that jaw and then we're just going to find our center line here very lightly put it in and this is basically running right down the center of the nose and then it gives me a good idea of where the center of my mouth is going to be yeah that looks nice okay it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to you just have to be deliberate with it so what you want to do is you want to take your pencil and you actually want to flip it around and hold it like this because what we're going to do now is i'm going to establish roughly you know where that nose um is going to be so and kind of like with the three layered method you know the charcoal method that i teach what we are doing here is we want to punch in on the base tone for the rest of the drawing you don't have to draw the the planes of the face if you don't want to like i'm doing here but i have found in practice that this really helps me identify exactly where my features are going to go and as long as we're going light we're using a very light pressure control here and we're just trying to get an idea okay that's all we're doing in this step we are just getting an idea for where those eyes are going to go and we are starting to bring out the underlying form of the facial structure so just like we identified the sockets of the eyes now we're just going to identify the bottom of the nose or the bottom plane of the nose just like this and the nice thing about using uh sketch pencils for this is that we don't necessarily have to worry about layering you know medium charcoal on top of soft charcoal and then hard charcoal we don't worry about any of that this is extremely simplified and for a reason effectively what we're doing here is we're just practicing and that's what we're doing so just like with the three layered method when it comes to sketching and sketching like this i find that laying down a nice base layer a nice high value is a best practice so now here i'm going to do is i'm going to change my hand position with my pencil and i'm just going to bring out the edge out the left side of david's face here again it doesn't have to be perfect so long as you get a good idea of where that face ends and then here we're going to take our pencil like this and we're just going to very lightly start to identify the curls in the hair here and much like with the three layered method if you've watched my other step-by-step drawing tutorials we are focusing on the low values first even though we're just very lightly building up those low values it's more or less to get a good idea of where those low values lay okay and then you can start to do this here just remember it's the direction that you pull and this starts to give us a good idea of exactly what the overall structure of the face is going to look like but again very light pressure control i'm barely touching the paper here and these sketch pencils are very much kind of like crayola crayons right like the ones you used to use when you were a kid so they have that same type of texture so they fall off of the pencil very nice onto the paper but now here we're going to get serious we're going to get serious and we are going to establish um the nose here so we're just going to do a nice uh nice defined line just like this here and we're going to establish the line on this side of the nose okay the nostril right about there and just lift up just lift up with your pencil as you conclude that line okay and the cool thing is is now you can start to go in and you can just very lightly when you hold the pencil like this you don't have to push very hard at all you can maintain a very light pressure control and continue to build those low values all right what i'm doing right here these aren't so much defined lines as much as they are implied lines because i'm you know taking the lines and i'm putting them over and over and over each other this one here this is a little bit more of a defined line albeit not extremely defined because what i'm doing is this is the eye socket right this is where the eye of david kind of rests in the socket of his head so i want to start with implied lines and then once i solidify exactly where i want those lines to be then i can start to increase the line weight and the line quality of the line in question okay but then now that i got the back of the eyelid established i'm just going to go through and this is going to be the front of my eyelid just like that i'm just going to lift up as i conclude and then i want to start to bring out the center of the eye just very lightly and then if i look at the reference image here on the inside of the eye here we have a much lower value so i can go and i can start to build up that low value and bring out that contrast that we see in the eye for those of you that have been following my uh three layered method uh step-by-step drawing tutorials with charcoal you'll you've probably already noticed that we are actually able to move much quicker um when we sketch like this with our sketch pencils so and for those of you that are brand new maybe this is your first tutorial with me um i want you to understand that i am not trying to uh sketch david uh perfectly but rather what i'm doing is i'm focusing on subtle techniques and i am paying attention to um inherent mistakes that i make in my sketch so that i can learn from those mistakes and identify what doesn't work for a certain aesthetics that i'm going for so i'm a big fan of making mistakes that's the only way that you grow all right and then what i'm doing here is i'm just establishing the inside of the center of the eye so i got my boundary and then i'm just going to darken that up i'm going to lower that value and then i'm just bringing out the the eyebrow here above the eye and then when i look at the eye i have a little little shadow so i want to use like maybe a light to medium pressure control for this i mean i'm not going to be detailing this out but that's the cool thing about sketching is um you have a lot more free will in the sense of oh hey i'm going to try this and i'm going to try that versus if this was a commission piece then you want to stick to stick to what you know works for a fact so but then notice notice this notice how i just you know grab my pencil and i swapped it and now i'm basically using the side of my pencil versus the tip of my pencil and then here i'm just gonna go back to the tip and i'm gonna beef up the top of that line see that see how he increased the line quality for those of you that don't know you know maybe this is your first tutorial and you are unsure of definitions um line quality is uh the thickness or thinness of a line and when you vary the line quality you can actually show form in a drawing with quite literally just the use of a single line like what i did there when i increased the quality of the line on the top of the eye and uh there's another definition that is uh akin uh to line quality and that is uh what they call line weight and line weight uh is used to describe the strength of a line or how light or dark it appears so there is very much this understanding between the definitions of line quality and line weight whenever your line quality increases right whenever it gets thicker lines that are thicker uh tend to be darker in their line weights and lines that are thinner tend to be uh lighter in their line weights so just keep that in mind just like this and that's the cool thing with these sketch pencils is you can go back in much like when we draw with charcoal and you can just just continually just lower and lower and lower that value as much as uh need be and then here i'm going to just increase the line quality of the bottom line of the eyelid here just a little bit it's the subtle things right it's it's it's the subtleties in in sketching uh sketching is one of those things where i haven't really made too many videos on it but it is something that you should do every day you don't have to do it for very long you know maybe do a quick sketch you know for a half hour every day you know once once a day as much as you can preferably every day so that you continue to keep your drawing muscles strong and then here what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to turn my pencil on its side and i'm just going to kind of beef up the brow this tutorial is more on the features than it is on details so i'm just trying to show you how we use the planes of our lumas head to identify exactly where those features go so that we can have accurate proportions or at least more accurate than if we were to try to freehand the proportions the luma said that's one of the great things about it is that when you draw portraits with this approach it gives you structure for your proportions a lot of times if you don't have a base structure like this you even if you are fairly talented naturally when it comes to portraits your proportions will tend to be off so that is why we're making this video so that you can see these tricks to get your proportions in line more so than not but then just like before i'm just going in i'm adding a very very thin line quality here to start to establish the eyelid that is on top of the eye and then of course the bottom eyelid and once i am satisfied with exactly where those boundaries of the eyelid and the eye are then that is when i will go in with the tip of my sketch pencil and i will add more of line quality and a stronger line weight so just like that see that and then this is a quick trick you can kind of extend your finger over the eye that you've drawn and then bring it bring your hand back over and then you can match that pole from top to bottom of the eye that you've just drawn and that is the best practice for helping you nail the thickness of your next eye you want your eyes to be as accurate as possible to the reference image much like with pet portraits like my pet portrait tutorials that i have on skillshare i've spoken to this um the eyes are the soul of your subject it doesn't matter if you're drawing a human portrait or if you're drawing an animal so of all the things that we want to make sure that we nail we want to we want our eyes to be slam dunks okay and we're just going to darken up the corner of this eye here then here what i want to do is i want to start to bring out the eyelid above the second eye here and when you look at the reference photo the eyelid here you'll you'll notice how how thick that low value shadow is above the eyelids so this is how we accomplish that you wouldn't want to go in and stand your pencil up on end and establish that line because the way the eyelid folds in to the eye socket it's not a prominent line it doesn't have a lot of line weight to it it just has a thickness so that's why you want to punch it in like that all right then we've got the center of the eye here then just like this you just want to thicken that up a little bit bring out that line quality and that's another reason why sketching like this you know is really really good practice and then just like this you just want to fluff this up a little bit start from the bottom and then work your way up see that see how that brings out the top of the eye like that that's what we want after you've done a few sketches like this you'll really start to understand the importance of direction with your poles when it comes to your pencils and it teaches you principally the importance of that so that you can take that forward when it comes to your charcoal drawings for clients especially then here i'm just going to take my pencil turner on its side i'm just going to put a nice light value on these eyes and kind of darken them up a little bit because when we look at the reference photo there's not a lot of light that is being cast over the eyes so i want to make sure that i'm speaking to the reference photo as much as possible and then here i'm just adding some line quality i'm darkening up the line weight of the top line of that eye and then just like this just like i established the top of the eyelid it's going back and forth with the side of the tip of my pencil just like this i want to bring this out a little bit very light very light because remember principally just like with charcoal you can always add more charcoal here it's the same thing you can always add more it's hard to take it away so it's better to go in light establish a nice light base and then you can just build on that lower that value some more as needed so okay and then for the nose here we're gonna do is we're gonna start from the top of the nose we're just gonna pull down okay and here what we're going to do is i am going to we're going to get brave here we're just going to punch in the nostril real quick just like that and then just very lightly but with some purpose i'm just gonna punch in that nostril just like that there we are and that other nostril is right about right about there comes up then it comes over looks like it wraps around like that there's the bottom and when you're doing this part you just want to pay attention to your values if you actually look on the inside of the reference photo's left nostril the one that i'm working on you can see that there are different values in that nostril so it depends on how much detail you want but again you start light nice light pressure control and then you can use higher pressures to bring out those lower values right more pressure lower the value lighter hand pressure higher the value all right then here i'm just referring to my reference photo and i'm just bringing out the tip of that nose but notice what i'm what i'm looking at what what i'm really focusing on are the low values a lot of times uh it's the same with the three layered method with charcoal and it is the same here for sketching when you focus on the low values a lot of times your mid and high values will take care of themselves okay essentially you can kind of think of it as this by definition is where we are quote unquote actually saving our high values remember how with the three layered method when we go in with our eraser and we retrieve high values well this is its cousin basically there is retrieving high values and then there are what they call saving high values and when it comes to sketching like this notice how i don't have an eraser i literally just have my sketch pencil this is where we save our high values so and then anywhere where we need to lower our value overall we just take our pencil like this turn it on its side and see that see how it actually does keep the integrity of where we really focused on our lower values and we do have that contrast across the value scale from low to mid to high when you turn the pencil on its side and you just kind of go over all of them the overall value across the scale does lower but you still keep the contrast so that's a neat little neat little trick just keep that in mind all right so now what we're going to do here is we're gonna break our third section into thirds we've got the top of the mouth and the bottom of the mouth right about there so there's the top there's the bottom all right i'm just going to turn our pencil on its side here and just like how we established the planes of the eye sockets and then the bottom plane of the nose this is what i like to do for the mouth i just kind of like to go through a real light and i like to put down a very uh high value base when it comes to shadows and now what i can do is i can flip my pencil around start to use the very tip of the pencil and in the wake of control right because remember i'm a big control freak when you turn your pencil and you use the side of the tip right for establishing base layers that is when you have the least amount of control when you grab your pencil and flip it around like this and you just and you use the tip you have pinpoint control you have a lot more control over exactly where you are drawing exactly where those low values are being conveyed okay so just kind of keep that in mind it's the same principle with three layered method like when we use brushes right we're establishing a base layer we're moving very quickly but we have little control you know and then we grab a pencil and then we have um absolute control so it's the same principle slightly different um slightly different technique because we're sketching right we're not we're not drawing with charcoal so just keep that in mind so now here what i'm doing is i'm just i'm very lightly going in just like with the eye very lightly and i am establishing the top of the lip and then the side of the lip and then i'm going to come up here real light i'm using a very light pressure control and i'm just going to pull this line across i'm trying to get an idea of how that top lip is gonna sit right underneath the nose but i want my lines to have a very very thin quality i want them to have a very light weight okay at first at first because the last thing you want is you don't want to go in you know with a super super heavy uh pressure control and and put in a super thick quality and then a super dark line weight because then you know what what if it's too much right then your sketch isn't going to look nearly as realistic as it would be if you did it like this so just keep that best practice in mind okay very light you can always add more later okay and then the bottom see how we got our reference point right here what i want to do is i actually want to thicken up the line quality of the bottom of the upper lip okay nice and slow nice and slow we enjoy drawing we enjoy taking our time this is our happy place there's no need to rush it right then here i just like to establish some lines to start to trick the viewer's eye that there is a three-dimensional form in two-dimensional space and here's the best practice for the lips check this out see how i just did the line punched in these implied lines here just like that and then we're going to continue to thicken up the line quality and the weight on the bottom of this lip and then you can go back through like this and you can just do some do some nice light poles and lift up from the line because if you look at the reference photo we want to try to be as true to the low values in the reference photo as we can and here up on the top looks like there's a little shadow on the top of the lip that shadow pulls across the lip overall again guys we're not trying to do this perfect this is literally just for practice the biggest point that i want to drive home with this specific video is i want to show you how your proportions can benefit by using a loomis head okay that's that's really uh the key takeaway in this video and hopefully you get to learn some you know real subtle uh sketching tricks i just lift up like this right here when it comes to bringing out cheeks and around you know the muscles around the chin and the mouth it's all the direction that you pull just like this very light pressure control right i'm more or less gliding the tip of my pencil across the paper and it's all direction because basically what you're doing is you are setting the viewer's eye up for success in the sense of what you are implying right and that's what makes a good sketch as opposed to a rough sketch then here just wanna punch in the the bottom lip and then if you look at the reference photo from that line we're gonna we're gonna bring out some some lower values there's a couple different tones in the value for the bottom lip here and then of course we have our chin alright and the way the light strikes the chin of david we have to keep that in mind here so but again the uh the principle doesn't change from the eyes to the nose to the mouth right we are focusing on the low values and then that way those mid values those high values take care of themselves especially considering that we are not able in this technique to retrieve any of our high values so it's up to you as the artist to identify exactly where those are those high values and leave them alone and then again just like this it's it's the direction that you that you pull your pencil tip okay then there's a pretty harsh shadow right here so i kind of want to just very lightly go in just like with our charcoal and then slowly start to build wherever those darker shadows those lower values are right slowly build them slowly build them up there we are something like that we can go back in like i'm doing here and i'm just gonna kind of bring out this shadow a little more there's a slightly lower value coming down off the nostril right there there we go okay again this doesn't have to be perfect guys it's just it's just more or less how much detail do you want to give it remember this is all about bringing the features out not so much detail work okay so now what we're going to do so we're going to stand our sketch pencil up on end and we're just going to pull down and what this is doing is this is defining the edge of david's temple and then the edge of david's right cheek and he's looking at us right so his right is our left and his left is our right let's pull it down just like this boom just like that okay cool we're committed so there's that that's looking that's looking nice so now what i'm going to do is i want to establish david's slingshot something like that notice how i'm holding my pencil here right i punched that line in with the side of my pencil now i'm going to reposition and i've got a little fold in the sling shot here and then we have david's thumb so we're just going to bring the thumb out just like this you and you don't have to you don't have to draw david's slingshot if you don't want to but i figured hey why i'm here you know and what this will do is this will push david's face back a bit and it's going to bring his slingshot and his thumb it's going to bring it forward for us so then all of a sudden what we have is we have depth to the sketch right because his hand his left hand and his slingshot are closer to the viewer in perspective than his face is then here what we're doing is we're just kind of beefing up these lines we're increasing the line quality in the line weight and we're just lowering the value here where there's a fold in the slingshot and this is one of the things that i absolutely love about sketching like this is if you're new to drawing you will definitely start to understand the importance of direction when you pull your pencil across the paper and not only that but sketching like this will do you absolute wonders in regards to understanding shading and how you can build up certain values right and how you can pinpoint low values so now what we're gonna do is i'm just gonna show you some subtle tricks um for the curls in david's hair here just like this remember how we did it before now we're going back through and we're really pinpointing exactly where those low values are because when you actually look at the reference photo the majority the majority of the curls themselves are brought out and identifiable because of the extreme low values that we have between each curl so just like this once you have your low value base kind of kind of put down then you can take your pencil spin it around like this and then you start to use the tip just like that and so now what we're doing is we're darkening up our line weights and we are increasing our line qualities and because of that now all of a sudden we're going to start to be able to bring out each individual curl that we see in david's hair and here i don't want to spend too much time on his on his eyebrows but but i more or less just kind of wanted to show you this i know that i know that the hair isn't necessarily a facial feature but you know while we're here i'm just going to kind of show you on these subtle tricks and you can go through with your sketch and you can add as much or as little detail as you want but um you know when it comes to sketching a lot of times for me what i need to practice on is my proportions a detail work i feel like i'm pretty solid with my detail work but for me it's its proportions and that's just it right every single artist is going to have a different achilles heels that's just the way it is that's that's just the nature of life right everyone is going to have strengths everyone is going to have weaknesses and what i have found is that it is always best to really focus on what you're not good at when it comes to drawing because that is how you grow and become better but notice how the more time that i spend on a specific area the more detail the more the form of the sketch actually comes out and that's another thing that's really really nice about sketching like this is that this you know when you sketch sketching's for no one but you right like this is practice you know when you think about it when you think about like say professional athletes for example um you know a baseball player that's really good at hitting home runs definitely hits more home runs in practice than he does in games but if he didn't practice hitting home runs then he probably wouldn't hit nearly as many home runs when it came to the big show right and so in drawing it's very much the same type of thing practice practice and practice some more and then right here boom gonna thicken up that line quality increase that line weight and voila just like that all of a sudden we have depth that sling looks closer we've pushed that face back with effectively just one line and that's what i was saying about line quality you know you you can really mess around with form and and bring certain aspects of your drawing out with just one line's weight being increased okay so just be aware of that there we go just wanna lower the value around this eye a little bit and then see if you want to go through and if you want to kind of just lower your overall value very quickly you can do that with uh by turning your sketch pencil on its side like this and then when i look at the reference photo we have a pretty defined shadow cutting across on the corner of david's eye socket here so we're just going to establish the boundary and then we're going to take our pencil and we're going to really suck in that that lower value then you hear the bottom of these eyebrows i'm just going to kind of punch those in real quick i'm not going to get too involved on the eyebrows for this one i just i really wanted to focus on the eyes the nose and the mouth okay and then i know this is slightly out of focus i'm going to be upgrading the camera that i use to record these drawings for you guys but what we're going to do is we're going to start at the top of our bottom right quadrant here and i'm going to kick my pencil on its side and i want to bring out the ear so if you look at the reference photo from we're going to follow that line at the bottom of the nose see how it cuts across the face and then we're going to stick to that line so right about where that jaw connects right about right about here and then in line with the line as it cuts across the bottom of the nose that's where i'm gonna put the bottom of the ear and again this is a best practice you know when you are going in and you are putting down your base layer first just make sure you use the side of your pencil just like this and this way you know if you need to make any adjustments um you can you know the sketches will still forgive you and allow you to go in and bring out your actual defined lines kind of like this something like this the way david's jaw and the bottom of his jaw kind of plugs into his neck here it it's not very defined so we want to be careful that we don't define something that's not defined in our reference photo and here all right so now we're going to get serious what i'm going to do here is i'm going to use a medium pressure control and i'm just gonna commit i'm gonna place the inside of the ear where the ear starts to curl something just about like that and then from here this is where i'm going to start defining the bottom of the ear bottom of the ear lobe and then i'm just going to go up but you see how that works see how i go in with the side of my pencil do the base layers then i flip my pencil and then i use the tip of it and that is where i can start to solidify the form that i want in the ear and that's the same no matter what we're doing whether we're doing hair eyes nose mouth hands it doesn't matter it's that same approach when it comes to sketching like this and using your sketch pencils all right choosing the side of the pencil referring to the reference photo and then i can flip my pencil around just like this and now i'm going to increase my line quality i'm going to increase my line weight at the same time as well and all of a sudden starting to look like an ear something like in here and cross hatching you know that's cross hatching is the single biggest technique used when it comes to sketching like this if you're not familiar with cross hatching yet um don't stress because it's very very easy and it's amazing how quickly you can pick it up cross hatching actually came to prominence really um in the middle ages that's when you saw in a lot of and all in a lot of art especially um sketches where artists were like just more or less practicing right they weren't pieces that were actually commissioned um by royals or anything like that so then here i'm just kind of more or less showing you i'm not going to go into detail on the hair here but i just want to show you how we're just going to do the exact same thing that we did to david's hair on the right side of his head this is just trying to bring out you know the neck and allows us to start to bring out uh the underlying form of the portrait itself yeah something just like that you know even even if it's a super super high value just do a very very light pressure when you go to put in your base layer see something like that we don't want any lines to define because of the way the bottom of david's chin kind of kind of just blends into the neck here there we are something like that but this is just like anything guys you can spend hours just going back over it again and again again each time you would go back over it you would bring out more and more and more detail but um for the sake of this video and what this video was about i hope that you learned you know one or two things about how you can use the loomis head to establish exactly where your eyes are where your brow line is where the bottom of your nose is how you can break apart that third bottom plane of the face and establish the top of the mouth the bottom of the mouth and then where your chin will be you know that's really what this video was about and now and the cool thing is is we did this all in real time so i'm going to be doing more sketch tutorials like this because i truly truly believe in sketching like this not every drawing that you do is going to be a masterpiece not every drawing that you do is going to be a commission in fact the majority of your time spent as an artist is going to be practicing just like just like any venture it doesn't matter if you're a professional anything practice makes perfect there's a reason why that saying exists okay to sketches to practice and to practice is to be so the more you practice the better of an artist you'll be [Music] but just things like this you can go back through the tip of your pencil and cross hatch over and over and over again [Music] and just notice how with each pass we're bringing out more and more underlying form [Music] see just like this you can just go over this real quick boom and see how that brought the value down overall but at the same time it still allowed us to keep the contrast between high mid and low values stuff like that that's what we want something like that the big thing is just really focusing on the length length and direction of your pulls and when it comes to sketching always light always start off light except when you are going in to bring out and thicken up the quality of a line or to darken up uh the weight of a line okay so and also don't forget i am on skillshare where i have a whole bunch of step-by-step pet drawing portraits um for dogs and then yeah if you want to support me on patreon i'll have a link to both my skillshare profile and my patreon in the description of this video i hope you learned one or two things and good luck in those future drawings

Channel: Messer Creations

Views: 71,685

Keywords: charcoal types and differences, how to draw, drawing tutorial, drawing lessons, how to draw easy, prismacolor, how to sketch, drawing tips, drawing made easy, drawing class free, charcoal drawing, how to use charcoal pencils, charcoal pencil, loomis method, loomis method adding features, loomis method features, loomis method eyes, loomis method front view, how to draw david, michelangelo drawing tutorial, david drawing easy, how to draw david statue, sculpture drawing easy

Id: zvzTIK84q30

Length: 50min 3sec (3003 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021