How to Easily Draw Heads | Understanding the Loomis Method

what's up got my sketchbook here and yeah today we're going to be going over how to draw the human head now there are multiple methods out there that you can use um for drawing heads but i think that of all of them andrew loomis probably has the single best method as far as like if you're fairly new to drawing especially uh figure drawing like drawing human form and you want to get into say like portraiture right portrait drawing right then uh the loomis method is definitely the method that um i would recommend and the cool thing is that's what this video is all about as with any demo i'm going to be breaking it down and i'm going to be showing you how you can draw a perfect circle how we input our oval which is our side plane and then i'm going to be showing you how to accurately put in your vertical axis and your horizontal axis that is your brow line inside of the oval which is the side plane and then how to draw those lines across the front plane of your face and i'm going to be showing you how to do that for a figure that's looking off to their right i'm going to be showing you a figure that's looking off to their left and i'm going to be showing you the differences of how we manage varying the angles for those three different sections on the front plane of the face so i know it sounds complicated trust me it's not just like any new concept at first you go whoa i don't know this seems like a little much and then after two or three goes you're like actually you know what this is not bad at all now the loomis method is not the only method that's out there it's just one that i like because of its simplicity and you guys already know that i am a simple person i'm a simple artist i'm kind of lazy and if it's simple and it works hey that's good enough for me so after you get done watching the video make sure that you grab your sketchbook and just sketch it sketch it all out sketch 50 60 150 160 loomis heads because i mean as you can see like principally every single loomis head is the same you have your rule of thirds you have the rule of thirds within your third section i'm going to be explaining all of that in detail and it's going to be all real time okay always remember that when it comes to artistry and draftsmanship you can have all the talent in the world but a lot of times talent without development and focus and drive means very little okay you'll never realize your true potential as an artist unless you completely commit yourself just sketch sketch sketch and sketch okay let's start drawing okay so for those of you who struggle like me to draw a perfect circle have no fear because we're going to be using a compass and this is going to help us get a perfect circle every time no matter what so the first step to andrew loomis's method is you draw a simple circle so we're going to use our compass here to do just that draw our perfect circle and then the next step is that you want to draw an oval on the side of the circle and the width of the oval is going to depend on the angle or you can think of it as the direction that your subject is looking right so a wider oval means that your subject is looking away from you a skinnier oval means that he's looking more towards you and then in the bottom right quadrant in this specific luminous head we're going to draw the smaller oval to signify the ear and then i like to draw a plane line right here just kind of show how the head is elongated in that manner and then we're going to draw a line across to show our horizontal axis through the oval okay and that depends on if your subject is looking up you know the line will be pointed up if your subject is looking down the line will be pointed down so what we're doing now is we are drawing out our center line of our front plane and splitting the face into three sections this is what they call the rule of thirds so we now have our brow line the bottom of our nose and the bottom of our chin and then what i like to do is i like to draw from the center of the oval to the corner of the chin that is my plane that showcases the cheek of the subject and then i can connect the bottom of the jaw to the bottom of the oval and then start to solidify the outside portion of my subject's head and then what we can do here is we can start to bring out the neck and the details in the neck one of the things you'll find as you draw more and more loomis heads is that masculine necks tend to be thicker while feminine necks tend to be skinnier so just keep that in mind but the big thing with this is just to go light at first and then you can go back and you can really start to build up your line weight and your line qualities with planes that you dictate are important to your specific drawing but this video is meant to just be like practice right this is what you would do um in your sketchbook uh earlier today i drew like like 60 of these things all different angles just because i want the practice right so this is the first section the second section and the third section so this is that rule of thirds and then here in the third one about a third of the way down draw a line for the top of the mouth and then align for the bottom of the mouth you don't have to do the rule of thirds in the third section if you don't want to i just like to because it helps me with my placement of uh with the mouths of my subjects so yeah and that's pretty much it for uh that specific loomis head where my subject is looking off to their right [Music] but now what we're going to do is i'm going to switch up my color and we are going to do the exact opposite and i'm going to show you how easy it is to draw loomis heads in all sorts of different angles the first couple times you try this it might be a little difficult but just like anything the more you do it the easier it will become so notice how in this one i instead of putting the oval on the right side of the circle i put it on the left side and then in my bottom quadrant instead of the bottom right quadrant i put my ear in the bottom left quadrant of my side plane but the steps are the same the steps are the same here i have my hairline and now i have my brow line and now i'm gonna pull over my the bottom of my nose here and then what i like to do is actually like start with my center line i pull my center line down the reason why i like to do it this way is because right about there i can signify the bottom of my chin the loomis method is meant to be my guiding principle method if you need to change things up or if maybe like me you like to draw your center line first before you put in the bottom of your chin you can do that you know whatever works best for you that's the whole point is that we practice um sketching out geometric shapes for things like this so that we can get better and so we can build confidence and then we designate our brow line the bottom of the nose a third of the way down in the third section for the top of our mouth the bottom of our mouth so we have our first section our second section in our third section now that we have most of that solidified we can go ahead and we can start drawing out the neck something just like that and then what i like to do is after i kind of have the basis for of everything drawn out then i like to go back in like this and i like to kind of build up my my line weights and mess around with my my line qualities and stuff like that just to really bring out that that form you know and that's what the loomis method is designed to do is it's designed to help you very simply achieve that three-dimensional form in 2d space and that's why this is such a great way to practice three-dimensional drawing especially for um for portraits but the cool thing is if you vary the size of your initial circle you can vary the size of your portrait so say here for example i actually increased the radius of my compass and because of that i'm going to have a bigger head so i'm going to go in and you'll already notice that the circle itself is bigger but this one's going to be kind of special so in this one what we're going to do is for my vertical axis here i'm going to have it be at an angle and then i'm going to have my horizontal axis up and remember what i said earlier so when a subject is looking up your line will be pointed up your horizontal axis line will be pointed up and that's what we're doing here so we're going to establish our hairline we're going to pull this over and there's our brow line and then the bottom we're going to come up and then over and that's the bottom of our nose okay now on loomis heads where your subject is looking up what i like to do remember how i said i'd like to start with the center line on my front plane i pull down and i establish that center line and then i kind of shorten up just a little bit and then i establish the bottom the bottom of that chin and this is only because um the subject is looking up so the nature of the angle dictates a shorter chin even though it's more of an illusion than um than anything but we still need to speak to it because it's all about the angle but you'll see here as we solidify the side of the cheek here and then we pull the bottom of the jaw over slightly but here first what i'm going to do is i'm going to put the ear in the bottom left quadrant of our side plane and then from there i'm going to pull down the center down and then over and i'm going to connect in the jaw there we are then from here this is basically the the bottom plane on the bottom of the jaw like when you look up this is this is that plane so obviously it's going to be out of the sunlight so i'm going to darken it up i'm going to solidify my the center of my brow line the center of the bottom of my nose i'm going to go a third of the way down in my third section for the top of the mouth and the bottom of the mouth and get those brought out and then while we're here i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to solidify a neck i think what i'm going to do on this one is i'm going to add just a little bit more masculine of a neck right a little bit a little bit thicker this guy works out a lot so but remember what i said on this is you you can make the neck as thick or as skinny as you want remember thicker necks will show a more masculine figure skinnier necks will show a more feminine figure so just keep that in mind and here i'm just building up kind of the back of the head and you can already start to see them once you have the basic shape of the loomis head um the rest is really up to you you can go through and start solidifying different uh planes and and really bringing out that that three-dimensional form see like this i'm just kind of building this up and bringing out that dimension there we go and then what i'm going to do here is i'm going to just kind of solidify the the side plane of the head beef up my ear a little bit so my first section my second section and my third section and then i have my cheek plane here from the center of my side plane to the corner of my chin and i'm just gonna solidify my horizontal and my vertical axis on my side plane and solidify my neck boom that's pretty much that okay so yet another angle right so by this point uh in the lesson i hope you're starting to see that all you have to do is put down a circle establish your oval then your horizontal axis and your vertical axis on your side plane and then the rest pretty much falls into place so like here for example our subject is going to be looking down okay so we've got that side plane and notice notice how our horizontal axis is pointing down okay our ear is in the bottom right quadrant and here we're going to establish our hairline we're going to pull over our brow line and then bottom of our nose and then our center line come all the way down past the first and second section to the third and then solidify where the bottom of that chin is pull the chin down from the center of the side plane and then connect our chin and these are these are general dimensions right they are general but when you're drawing from a reference you can still use the loomis method to really get a solid foundation for the rest of your drawing right these loomis heads that i'm showing you in this lesson don't have features right they don't have details they don't have any shading like this is just simple form that's all this is but one could make the argument that if you can't get simple form right then your actual drawing it might be off when it comes to its proportions right and if you are drawing a portrait for someone or if you're doing it as a commission piece let's say for a client then obviously you want to have your proportions be accurate right so that's all we're doing here just practice there are days sometimes there are even weeks worth of time where all i do is practice i just i draw to draw i'll draw 50 loomis heads in my sketchbook um simply because i need the practice right kind of like an athlete athletes don't just show up to a game and and perform right they win games and perform because they practice practice and then they wake up and they practice some more okay so this is the last one this is the last one and this is kind of cool so what this is going to be is this is going to be a profile angle so we have our basic circle and then i'm going to lower my radius on my compass and i'm going to put my side plane in the center of my original circle okay and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull my vertical axis down straight down horizontal axis straight across more or less and then i'm going to solidify my ear in the bottom left quadrant of my side plane right and then what i'm going to do is just like the other loomis heads i'm going to bring out my hairline my brow line and the bottom of my nose and then after we've pulled those out what i like to do is i like to start from the back and i like to solidify where the back of the head is at and then how the back of the skull plugs in to the back of the neck and then from there what i can do is i'll start from the top and i'll bring down the forehead all the way to the brow and then just drop it straight off of the original circle go down that to that third that third section drop the jaw from the vertical line of the side plane and connect it to the front plane easy peasy very simple and then from there just bring my bottom of my chin over a little bit kind of darken it up and then the front of the front of the neck something just like that and then of course i have my cheek plane which i pull from the center of my side plane connected to the side of my jaw and then i have my rule of thirds within my third section here for the top of the mouth and the bottom of the mouth and yeah that's that's pretty much that and then one of the cool things too is once you have your loomis heads all drawn out right once you get them to this step what you can start to do is you can start to play with the different planes of the face and you can start to shade them like this here see this you know you don't have to do this um if you don't want to but i mean it is fun practice you know if you just want to listen to some good chill music and kind of zone out and start to mess with um you know different lighting situations as far as how your subject is lit in your reference or in real life and then not only that but you can really start to practice exactly how that light is cast um onto a face or if you just kind of want to do what i'm doing here where you're more or less uh shading actual planes of the face so say for example what i'm doing here is i'm just going ahead and i'm shading the actual frontal plane of this loomis head and one of the reasons why i'm doing that because i have found just through a lot of practice and a lot of sketching in my sketchbook that when i do stuff like this it actually helps me remember exactly what a lot of the different planes of the face look like you know where do they sit um within specific angles of how a subject is looking so i mean that does help me i mean you don't have to do that if you don't want to um a lot of artists that i know use the loomis method and they don't ever shade their loomis heads so it's definitely a personal preference but you know if you're new to the loomis method and say you're uncertain about where certain planes of the face are whether it's the frontal plane the cheek plane the side plane then you know this would be a really good exercise for you you know a lot of times um how you practice will help you solidify your understanding much quicker right but you know that's really the big thing with the loomis method is just go nice and light and you know we're not trying to win any awards or anything like that a lot of times you know sketching like this in our sketchbooks is for us right it's just for us to try to get a little bit better of an understanding of how that underlying form works how if we can nail basic shapes and our shading we can really start to understand from a three-dimensional standpoint exactly how a subject is drawn you know andrew loomis when he created the loomis method he really made it a lot easier for young aspiring artists to understand something that's fairly complex you know all the things that we draw i think that human form especially portraits is one of the more challenging things that you can draw as an artist but you know everyone's different we all have different pain points so some artists are really good at drawing animals let's say but they're not very good at drawing portraits and then some artists are the exact opposite right they're really good at drawing portraits but like maybe say they're not very good at animals and then there's the artists that are great at both and then there's the artists that need work on both so and don't forget i am on skillshare i have a whole bunch of pet portrait tutorials that are exclusive to skillshare so i'll drop a link in the description of this video i'm also on patreon i would love your support there as well i hope you enjoyed this video stay happy stay healthy and remember never stop drawing

Channel: Messer Creations

Views: 224,053

Keywords: charcoal types and differences, how to draw, drawing tutorial, drawing lessons, how to draw easy, how to sketch, messer creations, drawing made easy, drawing class free, charcoal drawing, how to use charcoal pencils, charcoal pencil, graphite drawing, drawing setup, loomis method, how to draw a head for beginners, how to draw heads cartoon, loomis method tutorial, loomis method vs reilly method, loomis method front view, loomis method side view, how to draw head

Id: OUODCm4SMN8

Length: 24min 17sec (1457 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021