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<I have never felt a "head" was all that accurate of a form of measure. If we artists start measuring heads . . . >
Yes, I agree, Tim. Distilled to its essence, my own realistic representational training has involved studying nature and then looking at my drawing or painting and seeing how it differs from what I saw in nature (whether portrait, still-life, or landscape), and then trying to minimize or eliminate that difference. If we begin to rely too heavily on formulas, we start drawing and painting what we (think we) know instead of what we see. You beneficially provided the B/W photograph, which I accepted as "nature", and I detected a difference between that and the painting. I meant only to employ the head-height measure to examine the *relative*, not absolute, anatomical proportions.
Some formulaic approaches can be useful, nonetheless, especially in the early stages of the work. Daniel Greene is rather famous for his "presumptions" about the relative positions of facial features, which permit him to get stuck right into a drawing without delay, but if from his close, concomitant observations he can see that the actual model in front of him has features that defy those presumptions -- a high forehead, close-set eyes, whatever -- then to that extent the formula, useful though it was, is overridden.
Steven
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