The Loomis method for drawing the head, step by step

The Loomis method is the head construction Andrew Loomis taught in Drawing the Head and Hands (The Viking Press). He starts from a ball for the cranium, slices the sides flat, marks a cross on the front and stacks three equal spaces down the middle line: forehead, nose, chin. Plates 1 to 4 of the book (pages 21 to 26 in the Viking edition) set it out.

This guide follows his steps in order, then checks them on pencil plates from our free head rotation reference. Most are finished drawings with a few faint construction lines; two have the ball and slices drawn over them. Keep Loomis's plates 1 and 2 open while you read.

Most figures are the heavy-brow head, an older, bald face; two are the hard-plane head, which doesn't fit the average.

The steps as Loomis gives them

1. A ball for the cranium. Draw a ball and put an axis through it, top to bottom, like a nail through the top. Divide the ball in quarters through the axis and in half at the equator.
2. Slice the sides. Take "a fairly thin slice" off each side. The flat circle each slice leaves is the side of the head.
3. The brow line and the middle line. The equator becomes the brow line. One of the lines through the axis becomes the middle line of the face.
4. The cross. Where the brow line crosses the middle line is the point just above the bridge of the nose, between the brows. Loomis calls it the most important point in the head: where the cross sits on the ball tells you which way the face is turned.
5. The hairline. About halfway up from the brow line to the top of the ball. The space from the hairline down to the brow line is the forehead.
6. The nose and the chin. Carry the middle line straight down off the ball. Mark the base of the nose one forehead space below the brow line, and the bottom of the chin one more space below that. His words are "one, two, three spaces, all equal", and he presents them as an average ("on an average", page 23), not a law.
7. The jaw and the ears. Draw the jaw line from the chin back to about halfway around the ball on each side. The ears attach along that halfway line. On plate 3 he puts them "about parallel with the lines of the brows and that of the nose": from about the brow line down to about the nose line. To find their height, carry the brow line around the side of the head.
8. Tip the ball. Loomis says the ball "can be tipped in any direction". His plate 2 shows the cross on balls turned and tipped every way, and plate 10, "Tilting the head" (page 34), carries it into tilted heads built from planes.

The front view, measured

The cross is drawn on this plate. A faint middle line runs from the crown to the chin. Two faint level lines cross it: the upper one at the brows, which runs out past the face to the tops of the ears, and a lower one through the eyes. The upper one is the brow line, and it lands almost exactly halfway between the top of the skull and the chin.

The forehead can't be read off a bald head, so place the hairline by his rule, halfway between the brow line and the top of the skull. Measured that way, the three spaces on this plate come within about a tenth of each other, the last one longest: his average, close enough to draw from.

The ball fitted to a 3D head

The hard-plane head doesn't fit Loomis's equal spaces. This construction is fitted to the 3D head model the plate was drawn from, not drawn by eye. The circle is the ball that best fits the skull, and each slice takes just over a tenth of its width. The level lines, top to bottom, are the brows, the eyes, the base of the nose, the mouth and the chin, with the base of the neck below. The lines doubled at the eyes and just above the mouth mark the top and bottom of the ears.

Measured level, brow to nose base is 26 hundredths of the head's height and nose to chin is 37. A bald head has no hairline, so by his rule the forehead is 19, and the lower face is about twice his forehead. That's this head, not the view. The ball's equator sits about five hundredths of the head's height below the brows, just above the eyes, and the chin hangs about 15 hundredths below the ball. Follow the brows, not the equator, and move the marks to the head you're drawing.

In profile the slice is the solid circle, the size a slice that thin leaves on this ball. The top of the ear is level with the eyes, not the brows, and the lobe reaches the paired lines just above the mouth. On this head the ear sits lower than Loomis's brow-to-nose measure.

The cross at three-quarter

At 45 degrees the middle line on this plate curves down over the forehead toward the far side, as a line drawn on a ball curves when the ball turns. It meets the brow line at the inner end of the far brow, just above the inner corner of the far eye.

The brow line here is still straight, because the head is level and seen from about its own height, so the equator is seen edge-on. Tip the head up or down and it curves; how to draw the head from below and from above show how far.

The side of the head and the ear

On this plate the slice is the faint circle on the side of the skull, with a vertical line through it. The ear hangs on that line, with about three quarters of it behind. The brow line runs straight back from the face to the top of the ear, which is Loomis's way of finding the ear: carry the brow line around the head.

The bottom of the ear on this plate sits clearly below the base of the nose, so the ear is about a third longer than the space from the brow line to the nose.

Common mistakes

These are our notes from drawing with the method, not Loomis's.

• A full ball. Without the slices the sides of the head bulge, and the head comes out too wide from the front.
• Measuring the face from the top of the skull. Loomis's first space starts at the hairline, halfway up from the brow line, not at the crown.
• Drawing the features before the cross. The cross sets the turn of the face, so features drawn first have nothing to line up with.

A short exercise

Take the front plates of the heavy-brow, soft-planes and hard-plane heads. On each, draw the ball, the cross and Loomis's three equal spaces, then measure the plate and move the nose and chin marks to where the head has them. Then draw a ball turned to 45 degrees and one in profile, put the cross on each, build the heavy-brow head on them, and check the ear against the brow line.

The front view on its own is in how to draw the head from the front, and the landmarks the construction places are in parts of the head for drawing. The heavy-brow head is sold alone as Study Pack 10 and is in Volume 2; the hard-plane head is Study Pack 01, in Volume 1.

This guide is one step in how to draw the head at any angle, which puts all the head guides in order.