https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/us/politics/trump-special-master.html

All children sit in judgment on their masters;

Literature scholar Edward P.J. Corbett used to command "Imitate, that you may be different!" While his rhetoric and composition textbook may have encouraged students to emulate the masters, this pattern goes back to ancient Greek rhetoricians who also admonished

Link to rhetoric examples in antiquity. Link to the Finding Forrester example.

Dissertation: North African figures in nineteenth century French painting and prose. Talley, André Leon.

Physical copy available, but not digital: https://bruknow.library.brown.edu/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma991040298339706966&context=L&vid=01BU_INST:BROWN&lang=en&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=Everything&query=any,contains,Andr%C3%A9%20Leon%20Talley%20thesis&offset=0

Interestingly, this is still all-too-often how business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations view their own workers.

This general thought goes back to antiquity (and possibly earlier). In writing about classic rhetoric Seneca the Younger wrote in Epistulae morales

"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, 'pack close the flowering honey | And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "

(Sound a bit like he's one of the original digital gardeners, but in an analog world?)

He's essentially saying, read the best, take their thoughts and ideas, consume them, make them your own."

Generations later in ~430 CE, Macrobius in his Saturnalia repeated the same idea and even analogy (he assuredly read Seneca, though he obviously didn't acknowledge him):

"You should not count it a fault if I shall set out the borrowings from a miscellaneous reading in the authors' own words... sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of the old writers... We ought in some sort to imitate bees; and just as they, in their wandering to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the honeycombs, and transform the various juices to a single flavor by some mixing with them a property of their own being, so I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading... For not only does arrangement help the memory, but the actual process of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts to make a single flavor; with the result that, even if the sources are evident, what we get in the end is still something clearly different from those known sources."

Thickness of the neck

However you represent the head, whether it is relatively simply yet characteristic, or incredibly refined, you can now identify the start of the neck from the chin. The digastric plane is the bottom plane, it gives the head thickness. It will be useful when drawing the head from other angles - the biggest hurdles is working in a flat 2d plane while seeking to depict volume.

The gesture from the chin to the bottom of the neck is curved and downward. It is better to make the neck a little too long than too short. You then come from the bottom of the skull, the key here will be not to make the back of the neck too skinny.

Notice that the neck starts very low in the front and very high in the back. Think of your shirt collars, it sits high in the back and low at the front.