Sketch Awesome Project 4

Project 4 – Portraiture with Loomis Method

When I saw the portraits scheduled for this week for the first time, I was not incredibly happy. I don’t really enjoy drawing or sketching human faces as you need to be fairly good with proportions and details, otherwise you will end up with little monsters looking at you back from your sketchbook. Saying that, I’ve managed to create only one monster and one partial monster, so statistically speaking, I was successful.

It was quite a relief that the main objective was not to sketch realistic likeness of people from the photos but something that can be identified as a human being, which gives some room for errors and takes the pressure off.

This week project was split into 4 parts:

Part1 & 2 – Loomis Method

Part 1 was dedicated to creating a front and side view where the head construction would resemble a general human head. This was quite interesting and it did include many steps. Part 2 focused on the head tilted down and 3/4 view. I am definitely not a huge fan of 3/4 view and could not wrap my head around it.

I have not heard about the Loomis method before, so I definitely have learnt something new.

Part 3 & 4 – Bonus: More Heads

The main bonus exercise was a sketch of a mature lady and a side view of her head. I did enjoy this part very much and the tutorial video was great as well. I’ve decided to use a Polychromos 219 pencil instead of a graphite pencil. Like the colours on my page, but could do without smudges. I thought, for some strange reason, that Polychromos don’t smudge, but they do, unfortunately.

The 3 other heads were an extra bonus. I was happy with the top left girl, had a massive laugh with my “monster eye” girl and was hypnotised by the large eyes of my top right girl. I used Polychromos 110. Overall, it was good practise, regardless of the end result.

This week summary

• portraits are painful for me to draw, but I can cope with the side view
• like using colour pencils instead of graphite as they don’t leave a shiny coat and bring some other interest to a sketchbook page
• don’t like the smudging aspect of coloured pencils
• Loomis method is nice to learn, but I hope not to do portraits anymore or, at least, not any time soon