FTLOC Comics Art Boot Camp- Session5

 For Meeting of 

"THE IDEA vs. THE REAL"

These two search results actually came up side by side when I searched up Loomis. I wanted to show you this on screen last time, but forgot to bring my laptop. Then I lectured about it anyway. Maybe not so smart.

Anyway, here are two artists showing just how their drawings were founded on Loomis's approach. Likely, each hoped to parlay that apparent advantage into making an attractive and convincing face--but one missed the mark. Why?

Maybe you suspect the artist on the right "gamed" the challenge by working from a photo of a young woman with full lips, upturned nose, etc. But that's not it, not nearly. We've all seen females who don't have such features, and yet are beautiful... 

So faces are more than features. They are also capital-F Form. 

Before we know better, we ALL tend, in ¾ view, to make the eyes and eyebrows almost exactly the same sizes and shapes on both the near side of the face and the ever-challenging far side. We'll forget the nosebridge overlaps the far eye in this view of a head.  We make the eyebrows centered directly above the eyes, as if it were a front view. Etc. These are unhappy side effects of our tendency to think of the face as flat, at first. Even though we all know the reality of the face is very different: It isn't flat and it isn't a cylinder. 

But each of your blind spots you notice becomes a benchmark of your growth. 

E.g., nurturing that little rotatable, tilt-able 3D model of a Loomis head in your head takes time and observation and making a lot of drawings that are off. Then, more and more, your work shows the mastery thus earned. Your characters have "the breath of life," and so they come alive for your readers, increasing their emotional "buy-in" to your created world.

All this from doing a stack of "meh" drawings!                                              JH