How to start your portrait drawing.

hello I'm Stephen Bauman and in this video I'm going to be showing you one of the original head simplification models and this one is from Andrew Loomis what I love about it is that it's simple and it's generic and it applies to just about any situation you could find yourself in when you're drawing a portrait you can use it to establish proportion construction and even the perspective of the head I've personally used it as a jumping off point for developing my own head structure template that I use in all of my blocking courses and portrait lessons let's get to the demo so I can show you what makes this particular method so cool and so practical I'm going to be demoing here a basic Loomis head structure template and that always starts out with this sphere the reason that Loomis says he chooses a sphere is because in terms of the geometrical shapes you could start out with it is one that at the very least resembles most the cranium in making this circle of course it's very easy to test the proportion of your circle to see if you have it about right just measure the height versus the width here I wound up pretty precisely on a decent proportion now at this point we're still in a flat State and the first thing that Loomis wants us to do is to gain some sense of volume right now the easiest way to create volume or create form is by using contour lines so what he recommends is that we start with a kind of vertical center line for the head we would think about that ellipse traveling around the back of that sphere right now this line of course we're not going to see this is around the the back of the sphere but what we do see is this vertical center line to the sphere and what that tells us right if we think about facial symmetry so that tells us that this head is turned to the left after that we start with a horizontal axis eventually this is meant to show the brow Ridge we'll do the same thing I want you to both imagine but also draw through the ellipse so that we can see basically where the eye level that we're looking at this from is we're looking a little bit down on the head so we see that that brow Ridge ellipse so this then roughly corresponds with the glabella slash brow Ridge now the next step in making a Loomis head is that you should shave off the sides of the sphere Now by that what we're talking about is to take an ellipse much like this one and say basically that we have sliced down the side of the sphere and we have removed kind of shape that would not be unlike this like this kind of domed piece right that we've uh we've just cut off from the side of the sphere now this ellipse at the side of the head here will line up essentially with the edge of the forehead or what would be referred to as the temporal line even though we are looking at this head from the right hand side and seeing less at the left-hand side what we want to do is also yeah mirror that same cleaved Edge or that same cut edge of the sphere on the other side I'm starting to see a theme develop in this this is a theme of structural symmetry what we do to one side we also do to another side and in this way we ensure that the head that we're building has infused in it that sense of structural symmetry now this horizontal axis here actually becomes important and I'm going to replace this dotted line that I made a nice clear cross because the next thing that we're going to do is transform this from a cranium into something that also has the rest of the skull or the rest of the head attached to it I'm going to continue this vertical Center Line here pretty much straight down now that vertical Center Line is going to terminate here in the chin I'll talk a little bit later about the length of this and the proportions that Loomis recommends for the head the next steps can come in a variety of orders based on who you see doing it but I'm going to go ahead and start to indicate the side plane of the face here coming down to the chin next thing I want to do is find a jaw which here is relatively easy right so just about the halfway point of this ellipse we have this vertical axis coming down that should be more or less where we find the jaw on an average head now this is a really important point to remember just about everything about the Loomis head or at least where we're starting from here is about a generic head it's not about a super specific one that comes later after that I'm going to make that front plate of the face that mirroring Edge to the one that I placed out here on the left hand side you could do this before or after but let's go ahead and place the nose the brow Ridge like this should have a corresponding parallel line at the bottom of this ellipse which will indicate more or less where the nose will hit along that vertical Center Line now in establishing the proportions of the head something that Loomis does that maybe is a debatable Merit if you ask me is that he wants to establish the thirds of the face so from the chin to the bottom of the nose bottom of the nose the brow Ridge and then from the brow Ridge he likes to include what he refers to as the hairline now I guess that a hairline is a useful Landmark for a really generic average head maybe it starts to communicate a major plane shift in between the top of the cranium and the front of the forehead but in my opinion and you can kill me in the comments if you want to but in my opinion it's a little bit of an arbitrary marker unless you're drawing purely from imagination whereas when I'm building a head I usually tend to draw from a reference the location of the ear as it corresponds to the line of the jaw back here right so we have the brow Ridge coming across here and then slicing back on a flat axis we have the line of the mandible kind of coming up to the bottom of this vertical axis uh essentially the ear should sit somewhere in that vicinity on a slightly backward tilting axis so if we make a shape just about like this we can give that sense of the location of the ear and we're drawing a Loomis head in this three-quarter Angle now in addition to that I like to indicate the zygomatic bones or the cheekbones and where they correspond to this block-in structure it's not a required step for a Loomis head but I think it's nonetheless a very interesting one to do because it gives just a little bit more realism to your initial Block in maybe helps you recognize things slightly better than you would without it also it lets you show that classic back edge of the eye socket eventually that zygomatic bone would go right back here to the external auditory meatus which is your ear hole and then also the back edge of the forehead comes a little bit forward from where we find that ellipse we could also adjust the heck of it we can project a nose outward from here now thinking about the nose we know that the bottom plane of the nose at the center of it we have the septum and that hits right along this Center Line and we also know that the glabella sits here also along the center line of the brow Ridge from there it's really easy to just project a plane outward to show the top plane of the nose to show where that plane turns before you know it you have a nose projecting forward from the head now believe me when I say this is just the beginning of the ride there's so much more you can do with both the Loomis head blocking template and also just blocking templates in general but this is enough to allow you to get to a place with your drawing where you could actually exercise your observational skills to get you to a place where your drawing could look really quite specifically like the model I talked initially about those proportions right where Loomis wants you to see the head turns of these thirds right now depending upon the orientation of the head if it's tilting back it's tilting forward you're going to find that there's a different set of proportions in between these because of foreshortening but also from Individual model to individual model we're also going to find like a lot of Divergence between the length of the nose the length of the bottom third of the face there's going to be a lot of differences and this would be the moment when you want to implement those differences and create something that looks a little bit more from a proportional perspective like the model that you're drawing oh by the way this bottom third should have the uh the mouth as well which is going to be more or less equidistant in between those two ends so let's pause here and recap really quick the various stages of making this Loomis Block in we want to start out with that circular Cranium shape add to that a vertical and horizontal line that will take the shape of it in the ellipse these give the head a sense of three-dimensionality after that we want to shave off the sides of the cranium and add a cross to it this will become a landmark later on in the drawing from there we start to add the shield shaped front plane of the face that goes from the brow Ridge down to the base of the chin and also represents the side planes of the jaw following that we Mark out the head in thirds we go from hairline to brow Ridge to bottom edge of the nose to the bottom of the chin these marks make up the basic proportions of the face and of course they do change if the head tilts up or tilts down at this point we have a basic Loomis head what I've decided to do here is to also add a projecting planier nose and also the location of the ear in relationship to the rest of the features of the head in order for this blocking style to become most useful to you you're going to need to practice drawing it from different perspectives so drawing 9 10 20 30 Loomis heads all looking in different directions will be a great way for you to internalize this information and become really effective when you're drawing portraits if you're looking to learn more about this style of block-in and also other styles of portrait block-ins you can go to my patreon page I run a course there called The Block in boot camp we focus on exactly these kinds of issues and help you get better at the most important stage of the drawing to get there just follow the link at the top of the description of this video thank you so much for watching this video I'm Stephen Bauman and I will see you next time

Channel: Stephen Bauman

Views: 230,199

Keywords: Bauman, Stephen Bauman, Bauman art, Painting Tutorials, Learn to Paint, Painting Tips

Id: 5FMc0dFqt8c

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 29 2022