Thanks a lot Helm for your encouraging words and for that edit. It may or may not be interesting to note here that in the head you'd chosen to edit, I drew the nose first right into the empty space and then bogus'd the rest of that head around it, trying to skip most of the construction.

It is true that I must concentrate on beating wrong habits and symbols out of my head. Your description (and edit) of the mouth as folds of flesh is very helpful (along with the video Ryumaro linked to earlier). I tried to pay special attention to that in today's practice drawing and it seems like a huge improvement over how I drew the mouths before.

I also tried to vary line width and line darkness a bit here. Before I went back to drawing today however, I created another 3D model in Blender which is supposed to help me getting the angles of the construction lines for "Loomis Ball And Plane"-method right. I added some simplified ears, nose and lower jaw and teeth guidelines on top of the basic ball and middle line construction.

Today's drawing was done by first eyeballing the construction lines from pose E9 in the chart below and then adding the features on top of that. I left most construction lines intact and the neck is made up as well since I haven't started taking a close look at necks yet.

Hm... but if I try to loosen up and not pay proper attention to the construction, everything ends up oddly distorted and out of proportion again:


After that I fired up Blender to make a small model which shall aid me in constructing the basic ball and jaw. I can use this to peek how circles wrap around the flattened ball in 3D and how the basic jawline appears from different angles:

Those life studies are looking good, except maybe that the first one has quite childlike proportions and the third ones' arm/hand look a tad too long/big.


Yes, I really need to force myself to go more slowly and to overcome my impatience while drawing.

So today, I tried to extend the construction phase and to correct more errors while drawing (still missed some I think, the far eye placement seems a bit odd and there's definitely something wrong with the chin region and the neck):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elj5xUgAmV0

Just wasted 2h making this odd looking nose model:

Watched his video again. Tried building the nose from the anatomy he shows. Setting up the nasal bone first and then attaching those blue things and then the red things last seems to work well for the construction: