How to copy a drawing plate of the head, step by step
Archive of Fine Arts
Copying a finished drawing is one of the oldest exercises in academic drawing. The best-known set of plates for it is the Bargue drawing course, lithographs drawn by Charles Bargue with Jean-Léon Gérôme and published in Paris between 1866 and 1871. Students copied the plates before they drew from plaster casts and then from the model.
A plate is easier to learn from than a photo. The person who drew it has already decided which edges matter and which ones to leave out, and because every edge is a drawn line, you can measure from one point to another. When your copy is wrong, the plate shows you where.
Set up before you draw
Print the plate at full size or show it on a tablet, and put it beside your paper, upright and at the same height, so that you can look from one to the other by moving only your eyes, and draw at the same size as the plate. Once you can copy at that size, try a fixed ratio such as half.
Use a hard pencil and light pressure. Nothing goes dark until the last step, because every early line is a guess that you will move.
How to copy a plate in five steps
- Mark the four limits. Put small marks on your paper for the top of the head, the bottom of the drawing, and the points furthest left and right. Before anything else, check the height against the width: hold your pencil at arm's length with your elbow locked, mark the width of the head on it with your thumb, and count how many of those widths fit into the height, then do the same on your paper.
- Block in with straight lines. Join the limits with a few long straight lines that touch the outermost points: the crown, the side of the skull, the ear, the jaw corner, the chin. Straight lines are easy to compare and easy to move, so the curves come later.
- Find what lines up. Hold your pencil or a ruler upright against the plate, then level, to see which points share a line, and put those points on the same lines on your paper. On the front plate above, the inner corners of the eyes sit almost straight above the wings of the nose, and the corners of the mouth sit just inside the pupils.
- Draw the big shapes inside. Mark the eye sockets, the side planes of the face, the shadow under the nose, the lower lip and the chin as flat shapes with clear edges. Place them by their corners, the same way you placed the outline.
- Refine, then shade. Break the straight lines into the curves of the plate. Only then add tone, with the strokes running the way the plate's strokes run.
Check your copy
Step back and look at both from a distance, then look at them in a mirror or flip a photo of your drawing. A copy you've stared at for an hour looks right to you; flipped, its errors are easy to see.
Compare one measurement at a time and fix the largest error first. A head that is too wide will make every feature look wrong, and no amount of work on the eyes will fix it.
The overlay pages give you fixed lines to check against. At 45 degrees the rails cross the brow, the eyes, the base of the nose and the mouth, and you can see where the ear starts and ends between them. If your ear has drifted up or down, the rails show it at a glance. Why construction lines drift goes further into using an overlay as a check.
Three ways it goes wrong
Starting with an eye. Draw a careful eye first and you'll build the face around it. The features come out well and in the wrong places, so block in the whole head before any feature.
Drawing what you know. At 45 degrees the far eye is a narrow sliver, and the bridge of the nose cuts off its inner end. Draw two matching eyes because faces have two matching eyes, and the head looks turned less than it is, so copy the shape on the plate instead.
A grid. A grid will get the copy right, and you will learn the grid. Measure by eye, and if you want, lay a grid over both afterwards to see where you missed.
Practice it
Give each copy an hour or so, and stop when your measurements stop getting better. Start with the front and the profile, where the most landmarks line up, then the three-quarter views, then the views from behind. After a copy, put the plate away and draw the same head again from memory, then check it against the plate. Once that works, draw the next angle and check it against that angle's overlay page.
Head rotation atlas, volume 1 is built for this: 107 pages, four heads at sixteen angles, one drawing per page, and eight overlay pages per head to check against. For more heads to copy, head rotation volumes 1 and 2 has ten heads in pencil and tone. The free head rotation reference has all sixteen angles to try first.
This guide is one step in how to draw the head at any angle, which puts all the head guides in order.