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/ˈluː.mɪs ˈmɛθ.əd/

Loomis method

noun · drawing pedagogy

A head-construction system devised by American illustrator Andrew Loomis that begins with a sphere for the cranium, carves a flat side-plane from it, and locates the ear, brow, nose-base, and chin from fixed proportional divisions before any feature is drawn.

What it is

The Loomis head begins with a sphere. The artist carves a flat plane off one side of the sphere — the temple-and-cheek side-plane — leaving a smaller circle visible from the side view. The horizontal great circle of the sphere becomes the brow-line; the centreline of the side-plane locates the ear. From the bottom of the sphere, a chin point is plotted one-third of the sphere diameter below; the resulting front-of-face is divided into three equal thirds (hairline-to-brow, brow-to-nose-base, nose-base-to-chin) following the canon of proportion that traces to Vitruvius and Dürer.

The method's strength is that it works from any angle without the artist needing to memorise a separate construction per view. Tilt the sphere; the brow-line tilts with it; the features follow. Cartoonists, comics illustrators, and atelier students all use the same skeleton — what changes is only the surface treatment laid over it.

Loomis head construction: sphere with side-plane, brow-line, ear-line, and chin point
The sphere, the carved side-plane, the brow-line through the great circle, the ear on the side-plane centreline, and the chin one third of the sphere diameter below.

Etymology

Named for Andrew Loomis (1892–1959), an American commercial illustrator who taught a sphere-based head construction in three of his five drawing books — Fun With a Pencil (1939), Figure Drawing for All It's Worth (1943), and the canonical full treatment in Drawing the Head and Hands (1956). Loomis himself credited his teacher George Bridgman and the older atelier tradition; his contribution was the simplified spherical scaffold, not the proportional canon, which is older.

Examples in use

In Drawing the Head and Hands (Viking Press, 1956, pp. 19–23), Loomis introduces the head ball as "the simplest practical approach to head construction," demonstrating the same sphere-plus-plane construction for portrait, comic, and quarter-view illustration.

In modern atelier instruction, Glenn Vilppu's Drawing Manual (1997) and Steve Huston's Figure Drawing for Artists (2016) both recommend Loomis's spherical block-in as the first construction taught — Vilppu calling it "the head you draw before you draw the head you mean to draw."

See also: Head construction · Reilly method · Block-in · Plane of the head · Loomis head tool · Loomis method (pillar)

References

  1. Loomis, Andrew. Drawing the Head and Hands. Viking Press (1956). Reissued by Titan Books (2011), ISBN 978-0-85768-097-7.
  2. Loomis, Andrew. Figure Drawing for All It's Worth. Viking Press (1943). Reissued by Titan Books (2011), ISBN 978-0-85768-160-8.
  3. Vilppu, Glenn. Vilppu Drawing Manual. Vilppu Studio (1997). ISBN 0-9657608-0-8.
  4. Huston, Steve. Figure Drawing for Artists. Rockport Publishers (2016). ISBN 978-1-63159-088-3.

Sarah Chen

Founder of Grid Maker Pro. Classical portrait painter (BA Fine Arts). Writes about composition, drawing methods, and the art-history claims that don't survive measurement.

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