I cannot believe I’m at eighty hours. Nearly done. That’s amazing.
I’ve spent most of the past ten art hours on Loomis heads. They’re something I’ve been aware of but don’t remember ever being taught how to draw, and…it has been A Learning Curve. I wanted to internalize it so I can do it consistently and, y’know, hopefully well, at some point, so it’s gone kind of…
I did the first assignment and it wasn’t TERRIBLE, but the second lesson was…well, it was the first time I felt that the woman who put the 100 Hours course together had confused a course-appropriate tutorial with her own ability. It DID show how to draw Loomis heads, but it skipped a great deal, because the tutorial instructor had internalized it so she was able to skip a lot, and I don’t think the woman who put the course together could quite see that.
So I went and found another couple of more-basic tutorials and did the 3 heads from one of them, and then did…well. A lot of others…
…until I started to feel like I was beginning to understand what I was doing, before being prepared to move on to trying to do some on my own, which was the next actual lesson in the course.
I’m posting the above specifically because they’re not very good. I am, as some of you may be aware, a terrible perfectionist, and my inclination is to hide the really bad stuff. But also, I’ve had people tell me over the process of this and other projects where I’m struggling with stuff that I’m just Not Good At, how valuable it is to see somebody out there doing something badly, because it helps them give THEMSELVES permission to try things and not be very good at them at first. I will by god show my ass all over the place if it helps people get beyond that perfectionism that plagues me. :)
So yeah, I did a page full of mostly terrible loomis heads. Why are chins so HARD? But after doing all of those, I generally felt like I had the IDEA of what to do, even if I was actively bad at it, so I went to do the next part of the actual lesson, which was “try to draw these two faces with the loomis method”:
Drawing actual people instead of just trying to get the hang of the loomis method…helped. Not that those are difficult angles. And I once more went above and beyond the actual assignment, which was literally “just draw the loomis head shapes for them, don’t do features” and now I feel I should have stuck with that bc both of these people are much, much more attractive than the drawings I did of them, dear god. Sorry, models. :}
And then, finally…I started to really get the hang of it.
A key thing that these Loomis heads have taught me is that… I’ve always learned the thirds of the face thing with the eyes in the middle, but doing the BROW RIDGE in the middle is making a huge difference here, and is REALLY HELPING with my chins, weirdly enough.
Also, I was l i t e r a l l y standing in front of the bedroom mirror a couple of nights ago doing Loomis measurements on my own damn face. Which happens to be extremely Loomis-friendly, as it turns out. But I was like, what has become of me that I am doing this!
I decided the next step was to just try to draw a bunch from reference photos, and although I went in intending to just do no more than the VERY BASIC Loomis lines… the thing is that I can’t fully tell if I’ve gotten it at all right until I start putting features in. And then I got carried away, because I can’t do anything halfway. :eyeroll:
However: I’m pretty goddamn pleased with my progress here. I like the 3rd one on the top row a lot and I adore the guy next to her; somewhere in there I managed to give myself permission to not try for realism and to aim for… this. Which is much more like what I want to do than realism is.
The bottom row were very hard poses/expressions and I think I didn’t do terribly on the first two, although they’re not great, either. But I love the woman on the end. I worked really hard on her – I did a bad job with the Loomis, no that’s not true. I did a fine job with it and then mistrusted myself, tbh, so it took me a long time to finish her but I’m really pleased with her.
I think I’m going to move on to the next section now, which is more (possibly disembodied) features and placement on the face, but…I feel like I might have leveled up some with this, honestly.