Face to Face - Learning the Loomis Method
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The human brain is exquisitely attuned to perceiving faces, in clouds, and buildings, on a grilled cheese sandwich. An entire brain region called the fusiform gyrus is dedicated to interpreting faces.
These "face neurons" in people with healthy brains are so overactive that they scream FACE! in many situations where no actual faces can be found. Beautiful symmetrical faces and faces with interesting lines and features draw us into advertising, social media, television, events, and museums. There’s a reason you see faces everywhere.
Your mind evolved the ability to read information from people’s faces such as recognizing who they are, whether they’re paying attention to you, or whether they’re upset or happy to see you or intend harm.
It gives us pleasure to gaze into the eyes of another. “The reward system involved [in looking at faces] generates the same experience of pleasure when, for instance, we enjoy tasty food or happen to win a lottery”, says Olga Chelnokova a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo. “We are very curious about others’ faces, we read stories in them and evaluate their aesthetic value”, says Chelnokova.
As artists we yearn to recreate the emotional complexity of a human face - the essence of the human soul housed just behind the eyes. We gaze at our subjects and feel delight until we look down at our drawings. Despite our brain’s ability to make almost anything into a face, capturing a likeness is another story.
This student drawing below has all the features of a face but you wouldn’t be able to use this drawing to identify this woman in a crowd. Drawing portraits is a skill that’s difficult to fake and tedious to learn.
It doesn’t help that our minds work against our drawing ability. We tend to misobserve what’s right in front of us. When you look at a face your mind spends the most time looking at the subject’s eyes, then the mouth, and almost no time at all on the rest of the face. So what your mind sees looks like a child’s drawing with great big eyes, a big mouth, almost no nose, and the top of the head missing.
Look at this heat map of Olga Chelnokova to see how her subjects observed her.
When my students and artist friends come to me for help drawing portraits and characterizations of their beloved family members, and friends, I almost always start by introducing them to Andrew Loomis.
The Loomis method will not make you into a master portrait artist overnight. But I guarantee your portraits will improve and you will not need to revise as often as I used to.
Andrew Loomis was born in 1892. After studying art, he moved to Chicago where he opened his own studio - working in editorial and advertising for most of the top clients of the time, including Kellogg's, Coca Cola, Lucky Strike and many others. He also became renowned as an art teacher and his instructional books on illustration and art are still acclaimed classics in the field. He died in 1959.
Using the method Loomis developed we can find the landmarks for all the features in a “typical or ideal” human head.
Step by step he divides the head into basic geometric shapes - a sphere for the cranium and a block for the jaw and cheekbones. Each feature on the face has a specific location relative to the geometric configuration set up in the early stages of the drawing process. It is simple to apply and easy to use when drawing from life or from imagination. This method accurately locates all the features.
We are each as individual in our appearance as snowflakes yet at the same time we are also constrained within a symmetrical harmonic design of the skull that places the eyes, the ears, the nose and the mouth all in roughly the same place on every head, regardless of race, sex or age. Knowing this standard makes our drawing task so much easier.
When you apply the “standard” proportions of the face before beginning to draw the details of the individual’s features there’s less chance you’ll have one eye larger than another or the ears at different heights. Once you have placed the “standard” head in the correct position you can begin the more enjoyable task of observing the detailed variations of your subject from the standard - is the jaw wider, the mouth smaller, the nose larger?
When I first began drawing portraits I had not yet learned this system so I often had to re-draw and draw my faces over and over again to find a likeness to my subject.
Once I discovered Andrew Loomis’s method for drawing the proportions of the head I felt the scales fall from my eyes and the lights go on in my mind. It was like hitting the jackpot for my figure-drawing skills. That’s why I want to share my knowledge with you. When I give away what I’ve learned, I still get to keep my own knowledge but that knowledge multiplies and expands as it ripples out into the world.
Let's step through the Loomis Method. We’re going to start with a full-face view.
The first step is to draw a circle that encompasses the top of the head. The top of the circle should just touch the top of the skull and the bottom of the circle should be just below the nose as shown in the photo below.
Next, draw a vertical line through the center of the face. This divides your face into two symmetrical halves.
Draw a perpendicular horizontal line that divides your circle into four equal quarters. This horizontal designates the brow line - the skull bone above your eyesockets where your eyebrows grow.
Place a box inside your circle so that all four corners touch the edge of the circle. You should now have a box with four equal squares inside it.
The top of the circle describes the top of the skull
The top horizontal line defines the hairline
The middle horizontal line describes the brow line and the top of the ears.
The lower horizontal line touches the bottom of the nose and the bottom of the ears.
The outside vertical lines touch the sides of the skull
The ears are contained outside the box yet within the outer edges of the circle.
Now add two more of the same size boxes extending below your circle. You should have six boxes altogether. The chin will fall inside these two new boxes. There is a lot of variation in the shape of chins but the face is almost always divided into three equal parts.
Hair to Eyebrows.
Eyebrows to Nose.
Nose to Chin.
The eyes are located on a line halfway from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin. Measure this and draw a new horizontal line for the eyes.
The center of the eyes (the pupils) is halfway from the centerline of the face to the outside edge of the skull (the box). This is also the outer edge of the mouth expression marks.
The inner corner of the eye and the outside of the nose are halfway from the center of the eye to the center of the face.
The ears start at the brow line and go to the bottom of the nose. They are generally contained within the circle.
There is one eye distance between the eyes and from the outer edge of the eye to the outer edge of the ear. The entire face from ear to ear measures 5 eyes wide.
Last, we will divide the space between the nose and chin into three equal parts. The line where the lips meet in a neutral expression will be ⅓ of the distance from the bottom of the nose to the chin. It is just a coincidence that in this image the bottom of the circle touches the mouth.
There are many variations in the size and shape of a mouth. The mouth changes shape and dimension with expression but this is the location for a mouth in a neutral expression.
What you have now is a map for the location of all the features on a “standard” head. Memorizing this map will prove to be worth the time invested when you want to capture how the head moves in space. Once you can easily place the standard head in the same position as your subject then you will have the ability to convey emotion through gesture and body language.
If you’d like to practice drawing faces this way visit this website for links to free reference photos; https://doncorgi.com/blog/portrait-reference-photos/
I recommend you lower the opacity when you print out the image and draw your Loomis guidelines on top. In my experience it takes a few practice runs to "get" how this works and internalize all of the landmarks in different positions of the head.
Here is my favorite video tutorial on how to use the Loomis Method.
Stan Prokopenko offers a whole series of tutorials on the Loomis method. He makes them entertaining and fun. I highly recommend his entire Loomis series.
Once you have your standard head with the correct geometric placements for each of the features your next step will be drawing each feature accurately, incorporating and adapting to the detailed variations you observe in your subject.
I am not going into detail on how to draw each feature in this essay, but I may devote some time to it in a future newsletter.
The real power of the Loomis method comes when we use these same landmarks to describe the human head as it moves in three-dimensional space.
Drawing the Head in Three Dimensions:
Again, we start with a circle (sphere) to describe the shape of the skull.
Ellipse: An oval (ellipse) describes the side plane of the skull. It is ⅔ the height of the sphere and does not touch the top or bottom of the sphere but it will touch the back.
The top of the ellipse will define the hairline and the bottom of the ellipse will correspond with the bottom of the nose.
The top left portion of the ellipse corresponds to the brow bone on the forehead to the end of the eyebrow. This is where the front plane of the forehead meets the side plane of the skull.
Once we know how much of the side plane we are seeing we can determine the width of our ellipse. The width of the ellipse determines how much of the side plane of the head we can see and the direction our subject is looking.
Next, we will want to find the tilt of the head.
We find the angle of the horizontal diameter of our ellipse by following the line from the top of the ear to the eyebrow on the figure we are observing.
If the head tilts up then this line will tilt up, if the head tilts down the line will point down.
Once we know the angle of the ear-to-brow line we can continue that line across the front plane of the head to map out our brow line.
Create a vertical line inside the small ellipse perpendicular to the brow angle. The vertical centerline of the face and the vertical centerline of the ellipse should be parallel.
The intersection of these two lines on the ellipse will also give you the placement of the side plane of the face and the ear. The ear will be placed in the bottom quarter of the ellipse.
The bottom one-third of the face is the chin. The distance of the nose to the chin will be the same measurement as the nose to brow line or the brow to hairline.
The side plane of the jaw is a curve that starts at the center cross marks of the ellipse and slopes in an arc to the bottom of the chin. The arc of this line will vary a lot from individual to individual.
Using this simple method we have drawn a basic perspective placement for our entire head.
All features - eyes, nose, and mouth will have the same placements and spacings as in the front view.
The features are centered around a line of symmetry that runs from the brow to the chin. The more symmetrical the features the more we perceive the individual as "beautiful". Notice Loomis' comments on female beauty in the notes below.
The eye-line is halfway from the top of the skull to the chin,
The center of the eye is halfway from the centerline of the front plane to the outside edge of the ellipse.
The mouth-line is 1/3 of the distance from the nose to the chin.
The eyes are one eye width apart and have one eye width to the ear
The mouth expression lines will go to the center of the eyes.
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