Trying to further my understanding of anatomy, starting with faces

Good afternoon, Roseaphile, and welcome to Line of Action, I'm Polyvios, Polyvios Animations and how are you doing this afternoon? Happy Thanksgiving, but I'm thankful for my family and my friends inside and outside this website, but how are you?

Great job on your form, spaces, edges, and relationships of your pretty face sketch. I really think that you're on the right track, but I feel that the linear flow and fluidity could be even more flowing but more fluider. Why don't you please free yourself up with 15 mins of 5 minute sketches, using only underhandedly, but using your non-dominant hand? (3 drawings)

The reason why you could and should do this thingy is because, your heads and expressions will become lesser than itchier but lesser than stiffer, but more clearer but flowing. For more details, please look into a free PDF of the Loomis drawing heads and hands, here, along with this video right here.

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Forewarning, is that someone who made this video is entitled to their opinion, but always go with what would work for you the best, therefore, kindly take these things with a littler grain of salt.

I used to draw long faces as well, your facial features are for sure better than mine haha, as for the head shape, from what I've been told is that you want to figure out where everything should be before you actually start making the features

for example, if you know that the face you're trying to draw has their eyes at the same level of the top of their ears then mark it down using a line, usually a sphere. Proportions are hard but use other facial features to help try and guide you to where everything should be, other than that it's good and I like the hair especially

You are trying to acquire a better understanding for the proportions of the human head and face by following Loomis instruction, which is a worthwhile endeavour, but...

I feel like Loomis proponents have a tendency to falsely advertise how easy the method is for all kind of depictions of the human head is.

From my own experience:

a) the method suffers quite a bit from an artist struggling with drawing and placing clean circels and ovals freehand. And that is rarely a gift someone is born with. You can (and I did) hardcore grind that skill by starting each daily draft session with just putting in reps of drawing circles and ovals, ideally placing them in a way, that deviations become as apparent as possible, like concentrically inside of each other.

Grinding circles and ovals feels about as creative and fun as lifting weights in a gym. And like lifting weights, the first results will be quite sobering, but if you keep your first results around for reference and compare, you will see relatively quick improvements after the first week or two.

Like lifting, sadly you have to continue doing the reps basically forever, and you will never really reach an optimum. I am grinding circles and ovals (and some other things like straight lines parallels, and lines with alternating weight) for over a year now, and I am still not "there", but at least I got a clear idea how far I have come.

b) The ideal placement of ovals, especially of the side cutouts, in the Loomis method isn't easy at all. Especially once the head is tilted a bit, it takes either quite a bit of knowledge of geometry, or a very good spatial intuition, or just a lot of experience to draw them exactly where they need to be. And as a lot of subsequent measurements then depend on the correct size and placement of those cutouts, if you mess them up, you start distorting the whole result if you stick exactly to method.

And grokking the geometry is only the first step, if you don't draw from invention, but from observation. Natural heads don't all have exactly the same proportions, and being able to consciously make the decision, when and where to purposefully vary the size and placement of those cutouts is taxing.

Now, after complaining so heavily over the Loomis method, it still IS a good method. For beginners, even struggling with it does increase practical memory of the proportions and measurements of a human head. Just that the results of that will start to show in a rather indirect way, and often look best, when you don't consciously apply the whole construction.

And familiarity with Loomis is a basis for advanced shading techniques.

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TL;DR: Some practical observations.

The underside of your initial head circle clearly shows, that your mastery of drawing clean circles isn't there yet.

The "horizontal" ring around the "head circle" is the brow line, not the eye line. It indicates the upper end of the eye sockets, not the centre of the eyes. The way the brow circle is placed and tilted in your drawing does not align with the placement of the head at all. Your placement would indicate the model looking down at their feet.

You did not bother using the side cutouts at all, and instead used the entire "head circle" as basis for the skull. Sadly human skulls arent THAT round.

You indicated the central "vertical" line a bit, but did not bother to use it to measure nose and chin placement. With the way you placed your brow circle, the center line should be tilted quite a bit to the right, so the chin would end up tugged in towards the neck a lot.

Without a full centre line and the side cutouts you had no indicators for the chin line and the cheekbones, and just winged it all by improvising from your prior naive knowledge of drawing faces.

Off course, even just naively spending time improvising along familiar grounds, will add a bit of training for how to apply pen to paper, and a bit increased familiarity with human faces. It doesn't advance your technical understanding of drawing faces a lot, however.

My recommendations:

-Do some daily grind drawing circles and ovals to increase your line quality in that subject

and also

-Do some daily grind of going through the Loomis construction as a purely geometrical construction, without trying to match it to a specific subject.

-Understand, that matching the ideal construction to a specific subject is a second step.

Eventually, you will learn to vary the construction to accommodate for individual pecularities of the subject, but initially you will always be tempted to introduce variations just to make the placement easier, which will lead to distortions, that will come back and bite you, if you try to build on that foundation.