The ancient architect Vitruvius described the ideal proportions of the human body as they correlate with geometry.  Centuries later, Leonardo Da Vinci created his famous drawing, Vitruvian Man, based on these proportions.  Since that time, students of art have utilized Leonardo’s understanding of the relationships of one facial feature to another to create accurate drawings of their own.  In the process, they see that there are certain truths about the way God designed the body that are universal.  For example, the typical adult face is five eye widths across; the eyes are the midpoint of the face, between the crown of the head and the tip of the chin; there is about one eye’s width between the eyes; the nose is about one-and-a-half eye widths long, etc.  In other words, the eye can be used as a unit of measure to determine the accurate placement, proportion, and size of other facial features and are the point of reference to which all other features can be related.

Senior Studio Art students are learning, as they work on their self-portraits, that nothing in the created world is random.   By using various means of measurement, and by learning the basic composition of the face, these students are creating large graphite drawings for their first project of the year.  Here are some examples of works in progress.  Stay tuned for the final product!

-Jocelyn Collins, Upper School Art

Tags: drawing on paper, graphite, high school drawing lesson, Self portraits