We are pleased to share with you a 10-week long class brought to you by Art Mentors.
In this class, master draftsman Glenn Vilpuu teaches constructive head drawing.
Head drawing, week 9.
Today I’m going to take and focus really on the rendering, using reflective light,
direct light, and building the form.
A continuation of everything we’ve done already so far.
Okay, let’s get on with it.

Head drawing, week 9.
Today I’m going to take and focus on the rendering, using reflected light, direct light,
and building the form, a continuation of everything we’ve done already so far.
Okay, let’s get on with it.
Okay, a five-minute.
This is Piazetta.
You can see, it’s the same exact thing.
The idea here, now, if you take and break this down a little bit like this, you can see that essentially
what we have—not that extreme, but pretty much same basic idea.
We’re taking and starting off very, very simple.
Obviously, he’s got the head looking up so the eyes are all aligned, going up this way.
The neck is turned. And so we’re looking up underneath the nose.
Eyes.
Right here I took and started out making the top of the forehead really too extreme.
He uses very economical lines as he’s doing this. He doesn’t do a lot.
He’s just hitting corners. Basically, he’s dealing with the core.
The cast shadow.
Now, of course, he’s working on a toned paper, which I should have been starting off with this. I still can.
Let’s take and…
we’ve got the background.
Now, I’m going pretty direct here in that I’m
taking and just relying on 50, 60 years of experience for accuracy.
Now, the main thing we talked about this morning, using the core, what we get in here again is as it comes down
the side of the head, it’s giving us, it’s very subtle. The core as it comes around.
You can have strong accents on the chin,
and then really pushing the cast shadow underneath. You can see how formulistic this is now.
Then, a very strong tone behind...
pushing both sides.
Then he takes and he does a lot—I’m going to take out some lines I’ve got here.
Working with the white.
We can feel the tone.
Now, you look at the drawings of guys like Tieplo, you’re going to see verbatim the exact same thing.
A lot of this—not just things, a lot of these guys work very, very similar.
I’m keeping the white out of the shadow area. This is not that accurate.
Okay, so I think you get the idea. Let’s take a look at somebody else.
Now, this is Greuze—the French academy, same thing.
See the way we’re taking and working with the core, taking and coming down with the reflected light.
It’s exactly the same thing. Building the form up.
His drawings were the ones that were used by the French Academy, teaching people how to draw.
People would copy him.
So, we get the whole—but also notice that it’s really quite loose when it’s done.
There’s really a lot of free lines in the whole process.
The two guys that are actually, different technique, again, same thing.
Okay, this is a Dutch artist. I should have written his name down. I can’t remember.
Beautiful drawing.
The way he’s working with the light to the center and building it up and pushing the tones around.
Beautiful drawing. Again, the first impression is to think it’s really tight, but it’s not.
The tones are really—out there you’re seeing a little bit more, it’s more extreme.
It’s really, the hinting of the teeth you can see in there. Pretty cool drawing.
From there we’ll go back to looking at another Greuze.
Again, same idea. Subtler bit of core, cast shadow.
These drawing like this that he would do, he would often do the same drawing numerous times
or drawing from drawing. He would show up in paintings and in illustrations and stuff, all over the place.
Again, it’s the same thing. Pushing the combination of the modeling tone, core—
they all fall into that same group. What we’re going to do then is we’re going to take
and we’re going to go, we’ll do like 20-minute poses then. Try to focus on how little you need to actually do.
Control the value. It’s all about value control.

Okay, this is 20 minutes. Give yourself room.
The drawing usually these guys did we’re about that large, six, seven inches—fairly small.
Now, one of the things I talked about a little bit is that
not everybody’s eyes are in the same spot in the eye socket.
If you look at her, you can see that her eyes have a tendency to feel a little low in the socket.
Do you notice how high the space is
above the eyes to where the bone is.
I’m being pretty direct in doing these drawings. I’m not doing a lot of lay-in.
What I’m doing is a little bit of stumping.
Come through.
Softening.
Core.

This is my watercolors that I carry with me.
It’s an Altoids can.
It's a really, and this is using Sculpy.
I just squeezed the color in.
I’ve got to clean it out because I just put some colors in, and that cerulean ran.
But this I carry in my pocket, and what I thought I would do just to take and...
—so, the drawing I’ve been doing have
been done with the water soluble.
I’m just going to take and—of course, when you do this, you’re always at the risk
of taking and ruining whatever you get.
So, what the hell, nothing ventured, nothing—just another drawing.
Here’s one where I haven’t done too much to the drawing, so I’m going to go back
over it. Let’s see how much water I’ve got in here.
I’ve got another one here with a lot.
Here is another one.
Of course, when you put water on paper, the paper changes right away.
You have to kind of think about when it dries it’ll be back to the same thing.
What I’m doing is I’m going to take and to get a gradation, I start out away from
where the ink, where the pencil is and work into in.
In other words, we put down the water, but now I’m going into, so now I can gradate
that into where I have the water.
I can drop this whole thing here.
Now, we’ve got—it looks more extreme right now than it exactly is, I hope.
I’m taking and starting out here and then I’m bleeding into it.
I’m dropping the whole shadow side into tone.
I’m not avoiding the light.
Now, one of the things, when you work with a brush, a brush gives you a very sharp, it
makes the pencil more intense.
You can plan your line.
Often I’ll also cross-hatch through trying to get a subtle change.
Now, here I’m going to take and work from the outside of here.
Using the tone then to take and create on the outside.
Now, once it’s dry it actually becomes very difficult to see what it was that I did.
Generally, what I do then, once I’ve taken and it then dries, I will come back in and
work into it again with the pencil so that the water creates, like the stumping, the
water takes and creates a very, very subtle tone.
Let me show you some examples of that.
These are my sketchbooks.
A lot of these are water soluble pencils.
We were just talking now.
Here you’re seeing that I started out with pencil and I came back and added color.
Here, again, the wash coming in, using the wash with the black tone.
Back here, a combination again.
Color pencil.
A lot of these are just on-the-fly things of grandchildren or restaurants.
Here is applying the same thing to the figure, just taking and drawing directly with the brush.
This is at a scout meeting, Cub Scouts, actually.
I’m taking and trying to capture, but I was drawing this stuff directly with the brush
and coming back in with the pencil.
These are, again, sort of brush and pencil both.
Dogs drawn with pencil and then coming back in.
These are class drawings, construction.
Grandchildren, dogs.
Pencil and wash.
I do a lot of drawing with a pen.
These are just kids playing, grandchildren, nieces, whoever.
Okay, this is analyzing paintings.
We visited a cousin of my wife’s.
They had not seen each other in 30 years.
When they were chit-chatting, I was drawing.
Okay, this is them at the counter.
They’re making coffee and something to eat.
Now, this is a model at one of my head classes at Ringling.
These are drawings that were done at a restaurant.
Restaurant drawings of people sitting.
We had a table outside.
These are people waiting to get in.
Then model stuff.
Okay, expressions.
Gesture drawings.
This is making stuff up.
Just starting out with a chamois and then taking a kneaded eraser and pulling it out.
We’ve got Florida.
I was teaching a landscape class.
This is Vasquez Rocks, doing a whole series.
This is when my wife went swimming in Florida, and I was drawing the bushes.
My wife, grandchildren.
More grandchildren.
Alfred, Camille, Ethan.
These are thumbnails for drawings.
Scouts, more Scouts.
Grandchildren.
My wife.
We go to the dentist’s office a lot, or optometrist’s office.
Dentist’s office.
Rabbits.
These I did yesterday.
That’s the last one.
The Namiki Falcon, perhaps the best pen.
Okay, now you can see how this already has dried.
See the effect?

Okay, this drawing I’m going to take and do, working with the brush directly and sepia.

This is the kind of stuff you can be practicing while sitting in a restaurant.
Capturing people’s expressions. That’s what da Vinci said to do:
go into the marketplace and capture people doing real things with real expressions.
It’s hard just capturing just normal, everyday expressions.
They tend to be really subtle, and probably one of the top guys to look at for doing that was Gibson, marvelous.