Transcripts
1. Introduction : Hi, my name is Braden measure. I'm an artist, YouTuber, and I make content for
the Internet of Things. Welcome to class number three of a seven series
set that I made where I am taking you through and
showing you Andrew Loomis is time tested method for
drawing portraits. Anyone will tell you that's ever tried to draw a portrait. That it is one of the
hardest things to do, not necessarily
because it's hard to draw an eye, nose, and mouth. Those in and of themselves
are easy enough. The trick, or should
I say tricks is, how do you get all of that? In the proper proportions? That's what this
class is all about. So in this one, I'm going to be taking
you through step-by-step, showing you how you can use a compass to draw
a basic circle. Then taking that
same compass and using it to draw
your side plane. Once you have both
of those drawn-out, you can punch in your
vertical and horizontal axes along your site plane, which in turn allows you
to draw out your hairline, your brow line, the
bottom of your nose. And then once you have those
three lines established, you can then pinpoint exactly
where your chin goes. Once we have the profile done, then we can use those lines. We can use that framework
to punch in our eyes, our nose, our hair, amount. Can you use these lines to
help us shade and bring out and accentuate
the different muscles that we see in our
subject's face. We can place our ear. We can then draw out our neck and tight into the shoulders. And then of course we can go as far as we want when
it comes to detail work. So that's pretty much it. Portraits are difficult. And a lot of people,
when they see a profile and profile,
they freak out, they go. I don't know what to do. Calm down. I'm going to show you
exactly how you can draw out that profile shot
perfectly every time. No matter what, if you
don't have the tools necessary to follow
along in this class, don't stress, I have Amazon affiliate links in the
description of this class. But at the end of it all,
I hope that there is not a single portrait that you
go to tackle in your career. Scares you what to expect and
hope to see you in class.
2. Step (1) Drawing out your Loomis Head: Alright, so we're
gonna grab our compass and a second sketch pencil. We're going to take her
compass here and we're going to set it to about a two. We're going to place it right in the middle of our paper here. We're going to draw our circle. And even if your compass kicks out like mine just did there. Just go ahead and
reset or it should be a little indent in the paper
from the needle point. Then you can complete it. Now check this out.
This is a little cheat. You can take your
compass go from a two to 01 because this is a profile shot here,
a slight problem. We can put a second circle
in the first circle. Now with this signifies
is that side plane. I know it's not an oval, but it's close enough. Again, it's just a cheat. But we identify a vertical axis. And then I like to put it in my temple plane that will
just pull or hairline. And then from here, this
is our horizontal axis. We'll pull our brown
line from that. And then from the bottom
here, this is going to signify the bottom
of the nose for us. Then right about here we'll pull down and then straight down. And then roughly equal distance. Or we'll draw out the bottom of the chin
and then pull down from our vertical axis and connect both of those
points together. Then from here this
is our cheek plane. Then looking at the reference
photo will just get a rough guesstimate rather
of what the neck will look like tying into the
top of the shoulders. That's pretty much the Loomis
head for this reference. And now we're going to
move on. We're going to start implementing
some features.
3. Step (2) Drawing your Forehead & Eye: Okay, So this is where
the magic starts to occur with this approach. Because now that we have the
luminous head established the foundation of our
portrait is pretty much done. So now we want to
start to draw out the boundaries of the forehead
and the face as a whole. Now one of the
things you can do, like what I'm doing here
is I'm referring to the reference photo and
I'm starting to get a rough estimate of what the subjects hair
looks like, right? As far as the basic shape of the hair as it
sits on the head, I'm trying to not necessarily
focused on details. When we sketch like this. This is what I call
quick sketching. This is more or
less just practice. This isn't going to a
museum by any means. We're not going into an art
show where it's practicing. So what I'm doing is when I'm looking at
the reference photo, I'm staying true to the general dimensions
of the luminous head. Okay? Because the general dimensions
of limits head don't lie. They can help you place exactly where these
features need to be. So for example,
here's the brow line. That means my eye. It's going to be
right about here. Right about there. Okay. The more it's going to
pull it just like that. And then pull this
down. And there we go. So there is the beginnings
of our eye. Here. We're just going to
draw on the eyelid. Then through hatching and certain types of cross hatching, we can start to build out that eye socket
if you will, right? Because the eye sits into
the eye socket of the skull. And so because of that light, especially when the light
source is above the subject, such as this reference photo. We need to make sure that
we are sketching out and lowering the value
within that socket. So it stays true to
the reference photo. And that will give
the brow kind of a little brim almost right where the light is really casting
on, onto the brown. Then in and around the eye, obviously the value will
be lower because the light is simply not striking that
part of subject's face. But the cool thing
about crosshatching and hatching such as this is
you can go real life. Use a very light pressure
control at first. And you can even maintain
that same type of pressure controlling your
hand as you go over the same spot and your
value will get lower. Okay, let's move on
to the next lesson.
4. Step (3) Drawing your Nose & Mouth: Okay, so for this part, we're going to draw
out the nose, okay? So we're going to pull
out and away right there. Then we've already
reached roughly to the bottom of that nose line. So this is where we
want to start building out the bottom of our
nose. Something like this. Something like that.
But notice notice how that nose line bottom of
the nose, It's right there. That's right where the
bottom of the nose is. Once we know exactly
where the bottom of that nose goes,
the rest is easy. Punch in the nostril here. We can lightly hatch out the structure of
the cheek, right? And notice how we're utilizing the cheek plane from the Loomis head to
identify that structure. Then notice how right here, every nose does this, especially when the light
source is coming from. You have a shadow on the bottom of the nose
where the light just simply isn't reaching that right in here as I'm looking
at the reference photo more, it looks like the value
could be lowered the socket. And this is one
of the fun things about sketching like this guys, is that if you need to go in, if you want to walk away, come back second, look like
Da Vinci used to talk about. Then that's what you do.
Always, always take breaks. Always walk away
from your drawings or sketches wherever they are. Come back to him a minute
or two, five-minutes later. Give them a fresh look. You'll notice things about
that drawing that you didn't notice before me were
simply too close to it. Rather than right about here, we're going to pull
this out and then up. And this is the bottom
of our upper lip. Thicken that up a
little bit, right? We want to increase that line quality right
at that thickness. You remember line quality
is the thickness of a line. Line weight is how dark or light it appears onto the paper. So sketching like this, this allows you to play
with those, right? You can play with your
different qualities, play with your
different line weights. Alright, here I'm just
going to pull this chin over and now we have
a decent profile. Wonderful. Onward to the next lesson.
5. Step (4) Drawing your Facial Muscles & Hair: Okay, so now that
we have the shape of the subjects
profile drawn out, now I'm just going
to continue to build up those shadows that we see in the
reference photo. And I'm going to
show you how you can hatch and start to bring out definition in the
muscles of the face. But just like the
star from the line. And then just kinda,
kinda pull up, up and over, nice and light
up and over I from the line. And always bear in mind
the flow of the face. I've talked about this
in other classes, but you know that there
is an underlying flow to how the muscles interact with each other under
the subject's skin. So when you're
hatching like this, always keep in mind that if you start to
pull one direction, you should continue to pull
in that direction throughout that specific muscle
or muscle group. Typically when you have
different muscle groups, they will lay in
different directions. I'm unless of course
we're talking about deltoid muscle
or a bicep muscle. And those tend to flow in
the same general direction with the individual
muscles themselves, of course, being different
from the others. Now what I'm doing
is I'm getting a general sense of the
hair of how it flows. Obviously, looking at
this reference photo, I could spend an entire
class on just there alone. But this is just
a simple sketch. The whole point of this class is for you guys to start to get a really good understanding
of how you can approach a portrait
from the ground up, detail work and this
kind of a thing. This will come later. Then somewhere right about here. Typically when it comes to
the side plane and the ear, the ear will go in
the bottom right quadrant of the plane on
the side of the head. When a subject is
like this, right? When they are looking to
their right and you are viewing left side of their face, it will be the exact opposite in a subject that is looking to their left that year would be in the bottom-left quadrant. So always keep that in mind. Let's move on to
the next lesson.
6. Step (5) Drawing your Hair & Facial Structure: Okay, so now we're going to do is I'm going to look at
the subject's neck here and we are going to shade it and give it some form
because right now it's just got that basic
two-dimensional shape and we've more or less outlined where those shadows
are going to be. Something just like
this. This is hatching. So whenever I say
hatching, crosshatching, I'm sure most of you know this, but for those of you that don't, I'll tell you what they are. Basically when you hatch something that's just like
this, you're hatching, you're pulling down or you're pulling in one way
across the paper. When you cross hatch,
you are pulling in the opposite direction over the top of the direction
that you just pulled. So you almost have like a
bunch of little squares. That's what crosshatching is. And then when the lines
are by themselves, it's just called hatching. But this is a cool step in this drawing because
now we're, we're at it. We can continue to go back. Buildup low values,
accentuate high values. And when, whenever you're
sketching like this, high values are essentially
complete white. Low values complete black. So the cool thing about hatching and crosshatching
like this is if you do have certain
areas of the face of your subject where the light is completely that part of the face such as
like top of the nose, top of the forehead, then you don't even have
to really touch it. Only in certain areas
where there are shadows, whether they be cast
shadows or what have you. So you just focus on where the
values are the lowest with your sketch pencil and those high values will
take care of themselves. Here, I'm not going to get
too crazy with the hair. I'm just trying to
get a general sense of what these forms are. I think what we'll
do is eventually I'll come out with
classes and we'll focus just on here when it comes to these
reference frame. But we'll see something
just like this. And really, really play
with the shadows too. Like when you look at it,
there are shadows on the face right at the border
of that hair, right? You can go in with your pencil and you can hatch
it a little bit, or even cross hatch if you will. And you can lower those values. But there's no real
right or wrong way. It's just the big
part now that we have our proportions in line is now we can have
fun, we can relax. So we can just start to
really bring out the details.
7. Step (6) Finishing Touches | Final Thoughts: Alright, last lesson. So what we're gonna
do is we're gonna take our sketch pencil here. We got a little
shadow immediately under or subject's chin. We just want to
lower that value. So that's what
we're going to do. Here we go. This is the
front of the throat here. Then coming down off
that we have the tops of our subjects right shoulder. Then we have a little bit
more shadow immediately under the lower lip here. So that's basically
what I'm doing. I'm going back through
and I'm looking at any areas of my sketch. And I'm referring to my
reference photo when I do this, I'm just trying to see
where that light is not right. Then just going in. Using mid to late
pressure controls, right? Whatever you push
hard on the paper, you will get a much lower value. And with your sketch
pencil, obviously, the less pressure
you use and the lighter you go across the paper, the less residue from the
pencil will be on the paper, and thus, the higher the value. And this is one of
the reasons why I'm a big proponent of
sketching like this is because it does
allow you to mess with your technique, right? You can see what
different pressures will do to the paper and
thus your drawing. When you sketch like this, just like I was mentioning
before, underlying form. Sketching like this
enables you to really get a feel
for when you look at something and being able to translate the underlying
form that you see in the photo to the paper. Just like this, that Nick
flows a certain way. I'm going to
accentuate that flew on the paper with my sketch pencil and really bring it out. I want you to see it. Remember when you're the artist, you get to dictate exactly where your viewers eye spends
the most amount of time. Think about it when you see
something that it's blurry, Is that something that you want to keep looking
at it? Absolutely not. You want to look at
things that are crisp. You can bring out
a crisper drawing, but the more time you spent on it, I hope this was helpful. Stay happy, stay healthy, and remember, never
stopped drawing.
Messer Creations, Artist | Author | YouTuber
