Loomis Method Issues - Advice?

It may be the case that the only viable advice for this is "more practice", in which case, so be it. But I wanted to ask in case anyone had anything else to potentially help me out :)

The past week or so I've been trying out the Loomis method for drawing heads/faces. For some reason I've been finding that I consistently draw the cranial mass too small in the beginning, and while everything else tends to pan out fine, I have to redraw that bit to enlarge it so that I've drawn something human instead of alien. I'm not really sure how it keeps happening. Here's an example from yesterday, where you can see my Loomis construction lines and then the final lines as well (which STILL has the cranium too small, alas):

Any tips on what I could be doing throughout the process to cause this would be greatly appreciated!! Have a great day :)

Hi!

I had this problem when I started to seriously learn about head construction but then became more and more accurate at getting the cranium size right just by practicing.

Marco Bucci (art instructor) in his online course Understanding And Painting The Head, while showing a skull in profile view said this at one point :

Here is a thing a lot of people get wrong : the cranium is MASSIVE, our brain has to fit here. A lot of people will cut off the cranium, and you get this odd rectangular head shape, it has no room for the brain.

This very problem seems like a normal thing to occur when people start learning head construction, so as long as you are aware about this problem don’t sweat it and try to draw bigger craniums from now on to go against this habit.

You also have to keep in mind that any general representation of the head (Loomis head, Asaro head etc.) do not fit perfectly on everyone’s head. In most cases, you’ll have to stretch or squash the proportions of the standardized head you’re using when drawing from reference.

Hope this helped and if you have any questions I’ll try to answer :)

• Meijiisconfused edited this post on September 2, 2023 6:48pm.
• Meijiisconfused edited this post on September 2, 2023 9:29pm. Reason: corrected the quote