Old Lady Portrait Plane Drawing

This mail is picking up a thread that I dropped in April 2007, the Loomis head drawings. Well-nigh of the drawings in this post come from the year of no posts, only I'll update the site with what this exercise has pb me to now in the next mail service, and then bring at least this thread support to the present.

I of my original ideas when I came back to painting was that I wanted to get back to portrait painting. I find portraits fascinating,and am often to be found skulking around the National Portrait Gallery. Merely all the portraits I've done in the by have been of the cheesy copied photo multifariousness. When I was a street creative person in my twenties, every at present and again people used to ask me to re-create poor quality snaps of their nearest and dear, which I used to practice quite happily for them.I couldn't say the work was particularly inspiring and the results were invariably awful, they were crimes against art for which I should have been excommunicated, but along with the change people threw into my hat they paid the bills.

Although I tend to do by and large all the same life these days, I'thou still interested in other types of painting and particularly portraits. I haven't posted on this subject for some time, but a fair amount of my full general practice time is all the same taken up with cartoon heads in one course or another.At some bespeak I hope to outset devoting more fourth dimension to it, merely in the meantime I've been keeping it ticking along.

A quick recap: A while agone I started working through Drawing the Head and Easily by Andrew Loomis. Loomis was an illustrator who wrote some very useful art educational activity books, most of which are out of copyright and can be downloaded here.Cartoon the Head and Hands is a guide to drawing (funnily enough) the head and hands, but from imagination,and teaches a basic approach to building upwards the class of the caput which I've covered previously here. Now, Loomis being an illustrator, I should imagine that information technology would be very useful to him to be able to depict a head from any bending, and the aim of the book is to teach yous to do simply that. Loomis' books are primarily aimed at budding illustrators and come up from a time when at that place was mayhap more need for that kind of work and Photoshop was still just an illustrator's nightmare.

Working from imagination is a useful skill no doubt. Although my own work has been, and will continue to be, a result of direct ascertainment,it would surely be a sorry painter who had no imaginative facility at all. That said, it's my conventionalities that learning merely from a source likeDrawing the Head and Easily without any recourse to direct ascertainment would be inadvisable at best. The Loomis method of building ahead from a basic ball is effective as far as it goes I think, only I'm pretty sure Loomis himself had done a huge corporeality of cartoon from both life and photo reference, so expecting to be able to draw a head likewise as Loomis does working just with this book would be a little optimistic I call up.

What brought this into sharp focus for me was getting to the section of the book where Loomis starts to deal with the planes of the head. He simplifies the form of a head down into the main planes and proceeds to draw them from a diversity of perspectives, and to draw them very well.Personally, I started to actually struggle with the volume at this point. It'due south pretty like shooting fish in a barrel if all you want to do is copy Loomis' drawings, but that'southward not the point of the book. You're supposed to be able to imagine, and then draw convincingly, these planes from any bending.I found that to be side by side to incommunicable, to the extent that I began to wonder if I was missing the 'imagination' gene.

Here'due south a page from the Loomis book that shows how he develops the caput up from the bones planes into something more than circuitous:

At first I idea that looked like a very expert way to proceed, very sound. The Bargue approach stresses working from the full general to the specific, getting the large shapes right get-go and and so refining down. I know that principle works in practice, and at first sight Loomis seems to be following it here.

All the same, I recall that these planes are likewise vague to be really useful except in very general, conceptual terms. The trouble, to me, is that they don't fit together. Too many of the interlocking edges of the planes are undefined, even in the first drawing.What happens where the eye line meets the side of the socket going down to the cheek in the outset drawing? How does the oral fissure fit into the planes coming down from the cheek bone to the chin in the second one? Perhaps I tried to implement them too literally, and Loomis meant them merely as a full general guide. But later on the clarity and directness of the 'ball' arroyo, I found these planes to exist disruptive and poorly divers.

Here'southward a plate from the book showing how Loomis uses these planes when drawing heads from different angles:

At present, call me a sceptic, simply it appears to me that what Loomis is doing here is cartoon heads in perspective, which as a professional person illustrator with years of feel he was quite capable of doing, then superimposing the merest suggestion of his planes over the drawings.

I have a lot of respect for Loomis and I think there'southward a lot of good information in his books, but I don't always agree with him. In the class of my value studies, I had to disagree with Loomis on i point of his 'form principle' at least. That wasn't idle speculation, it was a directly effect of the applied exercises I was doing then. Likewise hither, I haven't tried a couple of drawings using his 'planes' method, struggled, and given up. I've done a nifty many of those piddling heads now, and subsequently a while it became unavoidably obvious that his method wasn't working for me. It just wasn't coming.

Time to go some of my own drawings out. Here'south a bunch of drawings based on Loomis' planes:

What I was trying to do here was to take the angles that Loomis was drawing his heads from and practice my own from like angles, just without copying Loomis' versions. They're pretty rough, I think it's obvious that I'm struggling. There were many much rougher ones earlier this fix,also.

I'thou trying to define the planes more clearly in my drawings than Loomis does in his, because I wanted to know how they fitted together.I was trying to resolve the vague areas in Loomis' planes in order to be able to imagine them in perspective more clearly.

The method either works or information technology doesn't. My problem with Loomis' examples is that he hasn't given you plenty information to fully realise the planes. I struggled on like this for a while, until, out of sheer frustration, I decided to make a head to finally figure out how those planes fitted together.

Firstly, I made a few small-scale maquettes with Plasticine, a few inches high. They were fun to do, and instructive, but I felt the need to do something life-size in order to properly resolve the planes, so the concluding head was made from clay. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Arno:

He'southward non exactly the epitome of classical beauty, nor is he much of a conversationalist, but despite his reticence he taught me a lot.

I'grand non a sculptor by any stretch of the imagination and I don't think his construction was very audio. For an armature, I screwed a length of wood,2 Ten i inches in department I retrieve, to the board with a couple of metal brackets. I built up the ball of his caput with screwed up sheets of newspaper covered with tape, and taped them effectually the top of the wood. Only once I started edifice upward the dirt around the caput, the weight of information technology started dragging the head down the forest which and so started poking out of the height, resulting in that odd lump on the tiptop of his caput. But at least I got to finally resolve how some of those planes might be made to fit together.

Just I still had to look a lilliputian further than Loomis to do it. Arno is an amalgam of the Loomis planes and a 'planes of the head' sculpture by John Asaro. Asaro was, as far as I tin can gather, a student of Reilly'due south, who was in turn a student of Frank Vincent DuMond at theArt Student'due south League in New York. Coincidentally, so was Loomis.

Hither'southward a photo of the Asaro caput. It looks like you tin still go copies of this caput from Planes of the Head, but I can't recommend them since I haven't bought i, and personally, I never, never, never buy anything from a web site that doesn't publish a phone number.Unfortunately I know very little about DuMond now, merely that'south a situation I program to rectify if I can. I wonder if this 'planes' idea comes from DuMond originally, or if it's much older. Regardless, it seems to me that Asaro has done a clearer job of resolving and describing those planes than Loomis has, with the result that my clumsy effort looks substantially more like Asaro'south version than the Loomis drawings.

So what did I learn from Arno, and from his smaller Plasticine prototypes? Well, I did figure out a way to finally resolve the Loomis planes.But the existent lesson was more far reaching and was as well unexpected. After Arno, something started to happen to my drawings. When I was drawing a head,I had a new, much clearer conception of the three dimensionality of the grade I was describing with two dimensional lines. I wasn't cartoon lines whatever more than, I was drawing lines which described planes. It'southward difficult to put into words, the nearest I can come is that I started to feel the grade every bit I drew, thus the title of this postal service. The near valuable lesson I learned was that sculpting something in three dimensions builds a 3 dimensional model of it in your mind, which translates directly, almost effortlessly, into drawings with a greater feeling of grade. I can't recommend it highly enough and program to practise much more than of it.

I have washed some drawings and painted sketches directly from Arno, but unfortunately he'southward fallen apart at present due to his shoddy construction and the fact that I didn't burn him in a kiln. It'due south a compassion, because he was a good model.

There was 1 other method I tried at about the same time which also proved to exist quite helpful. I got hold of a mannequin bosom from ebay and drew the main divisions of the planes on it. Here it is. The photo isn't good, just hopefully you can see the pencil lines describing the divisions of some of the planes. I've also marked the centreline, and the three chief vertical divisions of equal size which Loomis recommends.

This head isn't much better proportioned than Arno's, and parts of information technology are decidedly odd, but it is very calorie-free which makes information technology piece of cake to work with. I can lay it on the flooring or put it up on a shelf and draw it from almost any bending. Interestingly, it follows Loomis' three main vertical divisions of the head, from the hairline to the brow line to the bottom of the nose to the chin quite closely.

What this head represents to me is a kind of one-half fashion firm between an imagined head and working from observation. It adds an element that's missing from the Loomis method – drawing from a real head. It would undoubtedly be better to sit down some poor unsuspecting soul down and draw the planes on their caput with a magic mark, merely in lieu of that the mannequin does pretty well.

Here's a couple of pages of caput drawings done later on Arno was fabricated, and partly from the mannequin head:

I think there'southward a big comeback in these heads over the previous ones. The forms have more depth and three dimensionality to my eyes,and the planes are fitting together much more assuredly. They also felt a lot meliorate under the pencil.

I don't want to give the impression that the Loomis volume isn't worth working with. Firstly, I call back it's excellent, information technology's just non enough on it's own. Secondly, I still haven't got very far with it since I went off on such a tangent at the 'planes' phase. At that place's much more to come thatI haven't looked at yet, including the muscles of the face which I believe is the adjacent affiliate.

It may well exist that when I get to that stage, I'll notice myself wanting to flesh out the exercises in the book with some more in depth study of the beefcake of the head. Certainly I'd like to become concur of a good skull and spend some time drawing that.

Merely at the moment I'm nonetheless following the tangent I started going off on here, which has eventually led me back to sometime primary copies by a rather circuitous route. Here'southward the beginning of it:

The first 4 drawings here, reading from the summit of the folio down, are pretty much in the same vein as the previous sheet. I think the first ii were drawn using the mannequin head equally a model and the second two were imagined.

The terminal one at the lesser correct was something of an experiment. I thought it might be interesting to accept an old primary drawing and see if I could superimpose the planes on information technology, feel the form of the head rather than copying the drawing. This head is by Bernini, and I found the practise interesting enough to try out a few more than.

After this 1, I did a series of copies of Sargent drawings in the same way, which proved very instructive. Sargent turned out to be the perfect master to attempt this on since he simplifies his forms quite strongly into planes and has a strong sense of form. I'll save those exploratory drawings for the adjacent post though, which will pb me through a serial of old master copies coming eventually back round to Bargue, and anew appreciation of the mastery of his drawings and of some aspects of the Bargue drawing course.

It seems that all these disparate threads start to join with each other eventually. Frank Vincent DuMond, who taught Loomis, had some training at the University Julien in Paris under Boulanger and Lefebvre, who taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. It seems oddly apt that I should commencement out with the Loomis head and hands book and terminate up, via Asaro, DuMond and Sargent, back with Bargue and the French bookish tradition.All roads lead to Rome, as they say. Well, Paris in this instance.

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