For the past couple of months I’ve been working through the beginning stages of “Drawing the Head and Hands” by Andrew Loomis. There’s any number of books out there, all promising to teach you to draw this most difficult of subjects. But since getting hold of a copy of “Creative Illustration” by Loomis, I’ve come to expect something special from his books. He has a way of boiling things down to their essentials and then presenting them in a clear and concise way. When it comes to teaching drawing, Loomis is the man. I thought it would be useful to cover some of the elements of the book here as I work through it.

Drawing the Head and Hands has 4679 ratings and 38 reviews. Parka said: (More pictures of the book on my blog)This is the second Andrew Loomis book t. –The Internet Archive Team. We’ve reached our goal! Dear Supporters, Thank you for helping us reach our fundraising goal. You keep us going and growing – with your support we will do even more in 2019. Happy New Year! Andrew Loomis: Drawing the Head and Hands Item Preview remove-circle.

Of course, I can’t do more than provide a basic introduction. The text accompanying Loomis’ illustrations is indispensable, so if you like the look of what you see here then get the book. Like all of the Loomis books, this one is out of print, but usually have a few copies second hand.

“Drawing the Head and Hands” begins by introducing a deceptively simple method for constructing the head, and for ensuring that all the features are correctly placed. The drawing above shows Loomis’ basic sequence of building a head. Establishing the brow and centre line First, you start with a basic sphere. A cross is then placed somewhere on the surface of the sphere, and this defines the two most important anchors for the features: the centre line, and the brow line. Sketchup make 2014.

Most similar methods of building a head that I’ve ever seen define the eye line first, but starting with the brow line on the ball helps to get the main features correctly proportioned. Marking out the main divisions The next step is to cut off the sides of the sphere, since heads aren’t perfectly round. This gives us the basic shape of the cranium. After dropping a vertical line down from the brow line to define the centre of the plane of the face, we can now measure out basic positions of the main features, using the brow line as a starting point. About half way up the line running from the centre of the brow to the top of the skull comes the hair line. Taking this same distance vertically down from the brow line gives the base of the nose, and down once more for the same distance gives the bottom of the chin. I’ve labelled these 1, 2 and 3 on the second drawing above.