The text discusses a drawing method emphasizing drawing from real objects rather than copying drawings, starting with simple shapes before progressing to the human head. It critiques the traditional approach of starting drawing practice with facial features and promotes a natural progression, ensuring the student understands perspectives and proportions. Additionally, it outlines a technique for constructing an oval shape for head drawings, explaining the operations necessary for different head positions.
Important Observation
One might notice that, according to the most commonly practiced methods, it is with drawing the head that students usually begin and often end. Drawing, for most students, is reduced to copying a head from a drawn model. However, it is quite certain that it should not be this way.
Drawing from nature, based on real objects and not from drawings, is the foundation of our method, as we have announced. It is only after drawing from nature and in perspective, objects of simple forms, rectangular and spherical, that the student should be guided to draw the head from nature, which also has its perspective, something the student will not have the slightest idea of if they only draw from a drawing.
It should also be noted that starting with the drawing of eyes, mouths, noses, and ears is common in methods or practices of drawing from drawings. It is not without reason that we adopted an entirely opposite approach. The drawing of facial features will only hold the student's interest when they know well the placement and, one might say, the use of these features in the drawing of the head from nature. To train the student in drawing an eye, a mouth, a nose, an ear, we wait until the student feels the need to draw this eye, this mouth, because they know then what use to make of them, because they are necessary for completing the drawing of this head, which they already know how to execute the Mass in various positions and whose proportions they will know.
First Section
I. On the Construction of the Oval
The following operations are good for exercising beginners. However, it should not be believed that for each drawing of a head this construction must be repeated; it is nonetheless important to know.
The three positions of a head in profile, frontal, and three-quarters view lead to some changes in the construction of the Oval corresponding to these three positions.
On a vertical line, we take a chosen height represented here by AB, plate 9 (fig. 1). Through points A and B, horizontal lines are drawn. The height AB is divided into four equal parts. Through a point D, the three-quarters from B are divided into two equal parts. From point D and with the radius DB, a circle is drawn: through the center D, a horizontal line is passed. From point E, as center, taken one-third of the radius DF, and with a radius equal to DB, a second circle is drawn. From point H, given by the intersection of the circle on the horizontal line drawn through the center D, a vertical is lowered.