How To Draw Heads Using The Loomis Method

this video is brought to you by comics on coffee head on over to comicsoncoffee.com and type in code david finch for a 15 discount this video is a breakdown of how to draw heads using the loomis method andrew lumus was a very prominent magazine and advertising illustrator but he was by far and away remembered and best known for his series of instructional art books his books are an absolute gold mine and countless illustrators and comic artists have based the foundation of their career on his work i'm david finch i've been a comic book artist for over 25 years if you enjoyed this video please hit like and subscribe and share with your friends it really helps out the channel to start drawing the loomis head we're going to start at the very beginning and explore the simple shape that we'll be constructing our entire head off of and that is the sphere i'm not going to use a template to draw my spheres what i'm going to do is just lightly sketch and you can see i've got a mess of lines all over the place but because i'm going very lightly this is something that i can lighten down and i can get a pretty good sphere just on my own without using a template just by kind of molding it with a pencil like that now from here what we need to do is define an axis and with loomis what he does is he draws a line through the sphere and it really can be at any angle we're going to choose the angle that he uses in his first example where he really describes this and he actually uses a nail and so let's go ahead and do that and so the nail is going to intersect with my sphere right here and it's going to come out the bottom here and so i'm going to draw my opposing axis across that this way now if i was to draw through i would end up with a line along the back just like this and i'm going to draw another line for my sphere this way and so that's going to represent our brow and the front of our face here this will be our brow this will be the front of our face we need one more line and that is going to be this access axis along here let's make sure that that is defined well enough to make it clear so none of that is perfect i'm not using a ruler or trying to be incredibly clean with it because the point is this needs to be something that you can get comfortable sketching over time on your own very very quickly so now from here i'm going to lose my pin and i'm going to draw this sphere from a bunch of different angles just drawing a sphere and so if i was to draw it from the front we'll go a little bit smaller here so here's the sphere we're looking directly at the front of it and so that means i'm going to intersect it this way and that's going to be this line here and then this line will be right through the center just like this in my pin if it were there you would just see the head of it right there and this line here is going to be invisible it's the outside of my sphere i'm going to draw another sphere and this time i'm going to draw my axis down through this way and so my center line will be here and then my brow line will be here i've got a little shallow there and because i'm tilted up it's going to tilt this axis forward and you can see it's it's basically a 90 degree angle let's try and make that as clearly 90 degrees i can just estimating and so it's going to be just about there and i'm going to draw my third axis through here and what i've done here is really just draw the opposite of of this now if we were to look at the head from the side what you'd really end up with is just the pin sticking out just like this so there's my pin instead of drawing a whole other head from the side that's really what you would get and so you can draw this in infinite number of angles but i think that really covers the basic concept right there and so now that we have that we're going to move on to the next basic concept that loomis covers and let me go ahead and draw a sphere my axis i'll go just a little bit more shallow this time will come through just like this and i'll have it connect right there and so let me draw my center line here and that's going to be my center line of the face and my brow right there and i'm going to draw another line through here for the other axis you should see just a little bit of this connection here under the ball and now if i draw another line just about here on my sphere and draw it all the way through i'm going to draw it flat this is a flat surface this line here is going to flatten and so is this and i'm going to end up pulling this point in to just about here and so let's go ahead and erase the piece that we just cut off and essentially what we did is we just created a slice and what i have left over is something just about like this and we've gone ahead and cut that off and so we've ended up with a slice and we're gonna do the same thing on the other side it won't be quite as visible because it's around the other side and that slice there much more closely represents the actual shape of the head instead of a sphere which is much too round and so that's all some pretty basic conceptual stuff what we're going to do now is we're going to take what we did and i'll use the same angle from my first example this is going to be my brow line my center line and the next thing that i need to establish is my hairline and so that's going to be just about here on a face is directly from the side it would be just about here but since we're looking up at it you see less of the top of the head above it and so i'm going to take that distance and i'm going to duplicate it here and then i'm going to duplicate it again here you can measure it if you really want to be very very accurate as a matter of fact i think i went a little bit long here and so let's go ahead and erase that i tend to at this angle start to come out just a little bit longer toward the bottom because as things get closer they get a little larger and as things get further away they get smaller but we're going to keep this as simple as possible and try and keep my distances the same and so i've got a straight line drawn out i'm not following the curve down because obviously the face is flat coming off of the sphere and so the next thing that i want to establish is a line for my cheek along either side of the face and so i've got a line here and i've got a line here and you can see that this line automatically comes in and is for shortened as it rounds around the head and because you have that that sphere line as a reference it makes it fairly easy to get that established i'm going to go ahead and connect that down to my chin on both sides and i'm going to draw my ear connecting from from this point here and that's level with the brow and the bottom of the ear ends up being level with the nose let's make that just a little bit bigger then and so now my jaw is going to connect from just in front of that point right here and my mouth is going to be just about halfway depending on depending on the person and their face it can be a little higher it can be a little lower but for an idealized face it's going to be just about halfway and i'm going to extend the line back from that and that's going to give me the back of my jaw and now i'm just going to connect this up here and i'm going to draw a line through and that's going to give me my other side so we can see just a little bit of the bottom of the jaw there and so the next thing we need to do is start to establish our features and the planes of the face and i'm going to go ahead and start with the top of my nose right here and i'm going to create a shape just like this and my nose is going to extend from that and my nose tilts outward from this line and i want to make sure that the tip of my nose doesn't go all the way to that line because the base of my nose is going to be just right here and it's going to follow the same upward angle of the rest of my face now i'm going to go ahead and draw out lines for where my brow connects here and draw in and draw in the cavities for my eyes and before we go on the next thing i want to talk about is my forehead rounds around that ball but that's really not ideal and so we need to give that much more of a proper forehead shape and so i'm going to lift that and flatten that i'm going to draw a line back from here and back from here i'm going to bring my cheek out just a little bit and connect this line here just like this and my mouth is going to go right here the center of my eye sockets is also going to define the contours of my mouth it's going to define the outsides of my mouth on both sides and so now i want to go ahead and just inside there establish my eyes here's another eye and from the corner of my eye i'm going to come up at an angle just like this and this is a very important line because this really defines your eyebrow and it also defines where your cheek connects right here and it also is now going to connect up just like this and give us a plane along the side of the head here we won't see it on this side i'm going to draw the line for my forehead down just about like that define a plane along the cheek here and i can give my character a hairline by dipping in here just a little bit and creating a ridge all along and where i've connected here i'm going to draw a line up through and that's going to represent the edge of the back of my hair here and my neck is going to connect just under the ear on both sides and so at this point we've taken a very simple shape and used that to construct our face and then establish the basic planes of the face but now what i want to do is start to use that construction to draw the face from multiple different angles and keep everything as simple as possible instead of drawing an axis at this point what i want to do is i want to decide where i want my eyes and my brow to be and i'm going to go i want to tilt my head down just slightly and so i'm going to draw my line just about here and i'm thinking that i want the center of my face to be just about here and so that would put my axis just about like this so there's my starting point my brow is going to be just about here just about level with the top of where i'm slicing my head now my nose is going to be about here and i want to start going flat i don't want to follow the contour of the sphere all the way back obviously and then that's going to be my chin i'm going to establish my cheeks side of my face here i'm just going to keep it simple draw up a line through here and then i'm just going to connect through my chin my chin is generally going to be just about half half of this distance down through here i'm going to draw in line for my mouth connect that up for the side of my jaw and at this angle i don't think we'll really see this side of the jaw i could maybe sneak just a little bit in and i think that'll work but you need to be very very careful and unfortunately unless you have a little model that you can turn in your hand then i highly recommend that you do that it can be very difficult to know if you can see that chin or exactly the angle that you should be cutting in here and obviously that's an extreme example but to know exactly that angle there is no mathematical formula for it but making that exact is very very difficult what i'm going to do now i know my nose is going to extend outward and so i'm just going to draw that line and because i'm looking at my face downward i'm going to come down just slightly with the tip i don't want to exaggerate that because i'm only slightly looking down and now in my my nostril i'm just going to draw the tip of my nose if you want more information on drawing noses i have a video on drawing noses i have videos on drawing mouse eyes and noses on my youtube channel and you can check out those videos and so i know my eyes are going to be just about halfway here that's going to be the center of my eye but i'm going to go ahead and establish my eye sockets first so there's one eye socket my other eye socket is going to connect in just like this my nose is going to connect up here i've got that little plane there and my mouth i feel like i'm a little bit too far down going halfway and so i'm going to lift that up just a little bit what i want to do is establish this is the center i'm going to come out just a little bit here and out a little bit here and the corners of my mouth are going to be along these lines here and because i'm looking down at the face just a little bit the corners of my mouth are going to be slightly higher you need to be very careful you don't end up with an expression that looks like a small smile unless that's what you're trying for but for a neutral expression that's what we want now i'm going to go ahead and draw my eyes into my sockets and they're lining up with my nostrils so this eye is going to line up closer into that nostril there which is for shortened and i'm going to draw a line up from my eyes here and that's going to give me the angle that i need here i'm going to go ahead and cut this in draw in my ear that's going to be between my nose and my brow let me go ahead and lighten down the top of my head and we're going to draw in a hairline so i'm going to come down just a little bit also i've got this line here in the same way that i do with the mouth i'm going to bring that out just a little bit and i'm going to do the same here and i do feel like you really wouldn't see that side of the jaw and we're going to go ahead and just get rid of that and that's a much more basic construction based on the overall loomis head that really works for me before we move on very quickly i want to talk about some measurements i personally find measurements to be a fairly limited use and i'm going to explain to you why so i'm going to start by drawing the forehead here you want to be careful not to go too high with this line because otherwise you'll end up with a very long face on your head and so here's that line replicated again and that line replicated again yeah i think that's what just right maybe just a little bit longer because you start with this line baked in the first line you establish is your forehead line and if you make this too long or too short it's going to affect the proportion of the entire rest of your face it might take a little bit of experimentation to find this line exactly if i go further up here my whole face is going to be so long that i'll end up with something that looks very very distorted i don't know of an exact measurement to find exactly where that line is and frankly if there were an exact measurement it's really not a useful thing to use because when you start to turn the head at different angles all of that really gets blown out the window and it becomes much more difficult to reference exactly distances like that it's something you do need to get a bit of a feel for and so from here i'm going to go ahead and draw a line across from my nose and across from my chin and just draw lines down just to give me a box in which i'm going to be drawing the rest of the face i know that my jaw is not straight down from the top of my head it comes in just a little bit like this my ears are going to connect in between my brow and my nose let's just get those drawn in quickly there they are and my mouth is going to be just a little higher than halfway between these two points so just about like this and it's going to connect to the center of my eyes when i hear when i hear and that's going to connect to my mouth just about like this i don't want to connect my eye to my brow which i just did there and end up with a very distorted looking face and so you can see there's starting to be a face that is beginning to appear i'm going to go ahead and just above my nose line from the outside of my face i'm going to establish my cheekbones and then bring those into my my chin my chin is going to be the same width or just a little bit more narrow than my my mouth depending on the kind of strength you want to give to your jaw my eyes are going to measure five eyes across which sounds a little confusing but all it means is that i've got a space an eye wide space between my eyes here and then my let's go just a little bit wider here my actual eyes here and then another eye width toward the outside and so i'm going to go ahead and draw in my my eyes and just erase this down a little bit so i don't have too much of a mess and you should be able to fairly accurately eyeball um the space between your eyes and and the at the outside to make sure that you're you're accurate i'm going to go ahead and draw my brow and to establish the outside of my brow i'm going to draw a line at about this angle up from my eyes and my brows going to connect right there just like that i'm going to draw a line for my whole forehead and then from the outside of my eye that's going to be just about where the where the the peak of my brow sits i'm going to draw a line back like this the top of my nose starts at just about the top of my eyes right here and then my nostrils are going to line up with my eyes and now i'm going to go ahead and finish my mouth just a little bit it's obviously a very simplified face and you'll find that a lot of times faces that you draw using really accurate measurements like this and being very careful with it can end up looking a little bit stilted i find that for myself all the time and they'll get more natural as you draw on your own from this point here i'm going to draw another line to describe that plane up here and attach my jawline to that my cheeks to that and now i'm going to draw from my mouth straight across and that's going to give me the sides of my jaw and that's a pretty accurate head that is surprisingly easy to distort and it's so easy to distort because when you establish from this line up to this line here if you don't establish an appropriate distance it's going to mess up with the proportions of your overall face so if you're having problems and you're feeling like you're being accurate with these measurements and you're still having that trouble that is the first place to look and make sure that you have that measurement set and now from here if you like you can go in and draw the plane of the chin here connect that up and get something that is more planar we're going to go ahead and do the same measurements from the side so i'm going to start from my sphere and that's as accurate as it needs to be i'm going to draw a line through the center vertically and horizontally and that's going to give me the center of my head just right here we won't see this line down the center of the face because it's because it's directly at the side but now what i'm going to go ahead and do is just draw a flat line here a flat line down from here you don't need to do any of this when you're actually drawing your heads but just to get this really established in terms of in terms of proportions and so from here i'm going to establish my forehead and that's going to be just about here and i'm going to take that distance i'm going to measure it out again measure it out again and that's going to be my face i'm going to draw a line back from my nose along the back of my chin i'm going to just go ahead and establish a line for my mouth i'm going to go just a little bit higher just right about here and that automatically now is going to give me my jaw from behind so i can just get that right out of the way just like that my nose obviously needs to jut out and so i'm gonna go ahead and and do that i know i've got a plane coming out like this and that's gonna connect to my brow just like this and i can draw a line straight down here but obviously that's not going to be very accurate what i need to do is remember what i have here i'm going to go ahead and start just a little bit back and draw that shape just like this we're looking at it directly from the side i'm going to come in here my mouth is going to connect here and my eye it's going to start right here not a full eye width back from the nose but three quarters of an eye width i think is a good distance everybody's face varies but for generic attractive face that's a good distance i'm going to straighten up my forehead just a little bit and now through all this i haven't established my actual cheek line so let's go ahead and do that draw a line up from here that'll give me this i had this point at the outside of the eyes and you can see obviously that's not going to be the case here so it's going to be much more if you draw a line straight down here i'm going to draw my ear in here and i'm gonna go ahead and adjust my mouth which i feel like even though i went just a little higher it's not quite high enough so i'm gonna go ahead and fix that and make that just a little bit higher and draw a line down from here and connect my cheek just like this before we move on with the rest of the video i wanted to take a minute to talk about our sponsor comics on coffee comicson coffee is a family-owned coffee company serving premium coffee to people who love all things geek they import high quality coffee beans from farmers all around the world and pay better than fair trade prices to make sure that farmers directly get the money they desperately need so right now i'm drinking dark side roast that's this one right here it's my current favorite i'm almost out actually i have a few favorites but this one's definitely right up my alley i like a nice strong dark rose coffee and this one is absolutely incredible you can subscribe to comic-con coffee and get a bag delivered directly to your house once a month once every two weeks or once a week which i really need to get on right away because again i'm almost out be sure to head on over to comicsoncoffee.com and type in code david finch for a 15 discount they're good people and they make great coffee for people like you and me all right let's get back to the video all right so now we have the basics down this is where we can really go ahead and start to have some fun i'm going to draw some heads at some different angles and in order to do that we need to be able to work with simple shapes and perspective obviously a box in perspective it's going to be something like this and if i was to draw a center line would be through here my side center line would be here and then i've got one more center line here and you can see how this correlates pretty closely to what we're doing with the sphere i'm going to draw this again i'm just going to start with a sphere which at all times and it makes it very easy to use is never an oval it's never different no matter what angle i draw it's always going to be a sphere where i start to add my character to it i'm going to draw this angle first because i really want to establish the direction my character is looking and i'm imagining they're looking this way here and so now i'm going to draw a line through like this and then i've got another line through here i'm just going to flatten that off just like this my forehead is going to be about here my face at that angle is going to be like this so here's another line another line and i can go ahead and lighten this down again and establish my cheek here on the other side we're very flat here so i'm going to be just about like this and that's going to give me the side of my head i've went i've gone very flat here so let me just correct for that my nose is going to connect out from here so there it is my mouth is going to be just about here you won't really see the other side of the mouth at all i don't want to go too wide with it either i might have gone just a little bit too wide there i'm going to come in here and then my jawline is going to connect right up through here i'm going to draw in my eye sockets and then my eyes are just going to sit within those sockets really won't see much of the other eye at all i'm going to draw another sphere and this head is going to be directly from lumus and we're going to start to do some loomis studies from different angles and so he's got his angle just about here and this is going to be my brow line and so let me draw that along my sphere and that's going to be the angle that i'm looking for for the front of my face just like this this is my brow line and so i'm going to draw my forehead line just about here my nose will be here and my jaw will be here i'm going to go ahead and flatten this here and so that's going to place my ear just about here and so i'm going to draw the line for the bridge of my nose here bottom of my nose it's going to connect up through here and it makes it very easy to get my nose established properly at the right angle just doing that following the same basic path i'm angling just a little bit because it's narrower at the front and i can use that to establish my eye socket here and here and so let me go ahead and draw my eyes in there in the example i'm looking at loomis is actually angling his forehead back along the sphere i don't like to do that and so i'm bringing mine out just a little bit further here just to flatten it and give it a bit more of a straight forehead these are all choices and now for my mouth i want to come out just a little bit in in here at the bottom and then out from my jaw which has this shape here there's the center here's the top of my mouth here the top lip bottom lip so i'm gonna draw a line from my eyes down my mouth is gonna be and the edge of my mouth goes to to the center of my eye and so let me go ahead and get my mouth established in here i'm going to come from this point here draw a line down through my chin and then connect up through here and back of my jaw is going to be just about here and at this angle we'd see some of the bottom of the jaw and you can see how using these basic shapes really does make it pretty easy to keep things working proportionally andrew loomis really has a very very good breakdown of how all of this works and it's very very useful but we're going to be looking down at this head and it's going to be tilting toward us but our sphere stays the same i know i want my brow line to be just about here and so the top angle is going to be here let's make sure that rounds around my sphere properly and then my ear line is going to be just about like this instead of fighting with your drawing and really trying to make line every line accurate you're much better off to just draw lightly and then just erase the way that i just did and so i've got my forehead just about here and i want to angle my face straight downward like this and so here's my brow my nose and my jaw my chin i'm gonna cut the side flatten that off and make sure that let's get that just a little bit bigger i'm gonna just connect this in very very quickly and get that angle right you can see i went too shallow with that angle it was contradicting the angle i had on my face there so let's fix that it is really easy for me to establish my sphere since i've got these two angles i can just make sure that my sphere connects along those angles other side of my chin is going to be just right here i'm going to draw a line all the way down line across my nose connect that up my ear is going to be in here we'll clean this up in a second and my mouth just about here draw that line up and that's going to give me the line for my jaw just like this and that gives me my basic head pretty well established from here i'm going to go ahead and start with really the keystone of the face in a lot of ways this shape between the eyes connect to my nose my nose is going to project outward from this line here brow because i'm looking down at it my eyes are going to be pushed up quite a bit higher probably really should establish my eye sockets it makes it much easier to draw the eyes in i'm gonna draw a line up from here and from here we really won't see that line at all because of the angle but it makes it nice and easy for me to establish my cheek line right there let's get my ear just looking a little bit better i'm going to draw a line and now i'm going to go ahead the center of my mouth going to be just about here because we're looking up at the mouth it's going to round around the face just a bit you need to be very careful with this because again it can look like they're smiling which is fine if that's what you're looking for but you don't want every face that you draw looking down at a face to look like it's smiling and i feel like i've got that effect going on just a little bit so try and keep that as minimal as possible draw my my jaw and now for me to establish my hairline i'm going to come just a little bit lower here bring it up through here to this point down to that point so that's the basic rundown of my understanding of the loomis head there's quite a bit more information that you can find and you can go far more technical with this but you have to bear in mind that the only way to really learn it is to draw multiple heads from multiple different angles and keep working it and massaging out the problems that you will inevitably run into you have to be patient with yourself and just understand that drawing all the features and making them all fit on the head from every angle is a challenge and there is no true shortcut andrew loomis's simple head construction is a great way for you to simplify the head and enough that you can start to draw these kinds of drawings from every angle as accurately as possible but it will still take work so be patient with yourself and allow yourself to make mistakes thank you so much for watching and i will see you in the next video

Channel: David Finch

Views: 820,956

Keywords: drawing tutorial, how to draw, comic art, inking

Id: 6i6JDwEwXJI

Length: 31min 33sec (1893 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022