Introduction to Proportion and the Mannikin

This blog entry is for my students since I'm home, sick today, but I think there should be some drive by merit  for the regulars.  

Today's class was going to cover two things in some depth: proportion and the Loomis Mannikin.

The Loomis Mannikin as well as a wealth of other drawing information can be found in the recently reprinted Figure Drawing for All it's Worth:

 Being Canadian I would prefer to just list the Chapters.Indigo link, but they're sold out.  Amazon.ca has it in stock here.  For the longest time you either had to pay a small fortune for one of the long out of print editions or download one of the pirate PDFs online.  I'm really happy Titan has brought this and other Loomis books back into print.
One of the class handouts will be a copy of the page below showing the male and female skeleton with a head-height ruler.

Another handout is from another favourite book of mine, Jack Hamm's Drawing the Head and Figure.  It's readily available at most bookstores and online at both Chapters.ca and Amazon.ca.  

This one really gets the whole relationship between the head as a unit of measurement for drawing the figure.  I should see about getting shares in the sales of this book as I go for the hard-sell every time I teach anything from this book as it has a wealth of well presented good information in a small and affordable package. 

 After a discussion and some examples of how the artist can use head measurements to improve their drawings we'd move on to the next part of the class where I'd introduce the student's to using Loomis' mannikin.  Below is another excerpt from the book, but not the first page of the handout I'm giving out for this.

And I'd demonstrate how this works as a good developmental too for constructing the figure as well as show a few other approaches to the mannikin tying in some material I've picked up from Buscema, Reilly and Bridgman.

The homework for the week would build on the previous week's line of action exercises, but involve the students constructing mannikins based on photos.

I'm crawling back to bed to hopefully recover quickly enough to teach tomorrow!

~Richard