Saturday, March 27, 2010

Fixler's Plane Head

Fred Fixler was a great art teacher from southern California who died Jan 21, 2010. He was a student of Frank Reilly, and brought much of his teaching as well as his own experience of illustration to his students.


On his official website is more about him, and some of the notes and handouts that he generously gave his students. One of them is a nice plane analysis of a head. If you wanted to sculpt a little 3D reference maquette of this head, it would be a good one to use for reference.

Fred Fixler
Thanks, Steve Kloepfer

Previously on GurneyJourney: Plane Heads, Character Maquettes, Reilly and Beyond

9 comments:

draigstudio said...

I am definitely going to give this to my students and pass on the knowledge. I love when teachers share withe everyone. Most of my colleagues are loving and we all pass our knowledge back and forth. We have 1 who is proprietary about everything and we try to explain that he got his knowledge through sharing. Professors like Mr. Fixler are amazing and that is what I always hold myself up to for standards when I teach.

Tyler J said...

He has some great wisdom in the Cave 22 section. Thanks for sharing it.

Mr. Muskrat said...

Thanks for sharing this, James. I never knew Mr. Fixler but after looking at his website, I knew some of his illustrations.

I really could have used the information under Cave 22 when I was in a drawing class this past summer so I have passed it on my instructor.

Andrew said...

Hah, that mustache of his only matches his generosity!

His resources up on his site are really something to behold - I think I might give that planar head a shot to sculpt...

Nathan Fowkes said...

Fixler has been a huge influence on illustrators here in the SoCal area. Many of the local superstars studied under him. He was no longer teaching during my college years but I took a sabbatical from work several years back specifically to study with some of his former students. I got to see original drawings of Fred's they had collected. Breathtaking.

Stephen James. said...

I recently had an ongoing discussion with someone from a painting class about the Riley method. He felt it was too formulaic and encouraged a mechanical approach to drawing/painting rather then one based on constant observation.

Bryan Tipton said...

John Asaro has created a plastic head model based on the planes of the head. I've found it quite helpful.

http://planesofthehead.com/index.php

Steven K said...

There is probably no instructor more misunderstood by the uninformed that Reilly. James Bama is a Reilly student, uses the Reilly palette to this day, and there is no one better at close observation and sensitivity to nature.

Yes, Asaro created a planes of the head sculpture. John Asaro studied with Frank Reilly.

Other Reilly students included Robert Maguire, Ted Jacobs, Rudy Nappi, Jack Faragasso, Stan Borack, Leonard Starr, and Basil Gogos.

"Frank Reilly could teach a wooden Indian how to paint, provided the wooden Indian wanted to learn how to paint." - Harvey Dunn

http://www.americanartarchives.com/reilly.htm

SVSART said...

Bryan you beat me to it, I love my John Asaro "Planes of the Head" it's what I first thought of when reading this post. Not badly priced either http://www.planesofthehead.com/order.php