Drawing the Head and Hands - Andrew Loomis

[AzusaPesant]

Now I get the concept of how he draws heads. Draw the basic shapes before putting in the details. I have learned how to make the simple head form, and face proportions. But what always messes me up are the lines on the circle when in 3/4th view or anything like that.

Does he use an instrument to make sure that those lines going around the sphere of the cranium are accurate, or did he just practice? Because I'm having a hard time with them.

[p sage]

Now I get the concept of how he draws heads. Draw the basic shapes before putting in the details. I have learned how to make the simple head form, and face proportions. But what always messes me up are the lines on the circle when in 3/4th view or anything like that.

Does he use an instrument to make sure that those lines going around the sphere of the cranium are accurate, or did he just practice? Because I'm having a hard time with them.

It's all about visualization and "feeling the form." Try to visualize a real face, or reference a real face, and then try to imagine a contour wrapping around it, or a cross-section cutting through it.

[armando]

It's all about feeling out the form, you have to use your judgement to tell what's right. The mechanical nature of the construction formulas are misleading in that they make beginners think that they can get their answers like a math problem. We have an inate sense of form, the function of those construction lines is get past the flat force of the page, to activate that latent feeling of form. There are actually many ways to do that. The ball with a line down the middle is actually pretty useless when drawing realistic heads. That line is a diagram, an abstract way to show something that is in actuality invisible: our sense of symetry. You could tell tell that a face was symetrical before you learned about it right? Trust your senses. Don't try to draw balls with vertical lines, draw people.