You may not have heard of Andrew Loomis, but you’ve nevertheless been influenced by his approach to drawing. He crops up again and again in online communities discussing the fundamentals of learning to draw, having influenced a number of folks now teaching art. To wit, the Loomis method for drawing heads has continued to influence artists to this date, long past his sharing of it in Drawing the Head & Hands.
Andrew Loomis was an illustrator and author who wrote some of seminal books on how to draw for aspiring artists in the 20th century. While his books read as dated, having been written immediately following WWII, the material and methods he outline are entirely accessible to the modern reader. As I will share in a future post, Stan Prokopenko (aka Proko) first garnered a bit of a reputation for a YouTube post that showed the Loomis method in action, as it were.
For the longest time his books were out of print, and could only be found as excerpts from Walter Foster Publishing. Then, between 2011 and 2013, Titan Books reprinted facsimile editions of the originals which can now be found for purchase through Amazon.com. Alternately, you can download PDFs from sites such as Alexhays.com which has the mission of saving Andrew Loomis’ works for future generations. You can decide whether you want to pay for a printed version, or simply download the PDFs which can be added to Kindle, iBook or other computer reader app.
