Portrait Sculpting

This portrait sculpting course will dive deep into the techniques and principles that will help you master the portrait. Portrait sculpting is one of the most difficult challenges that visual artists can take on but if you follow the lessons and do the corresponding assignments you'll be surprised how fast you will improve. 

We will start off by building a strong foundation with projects like building "profile pancakes" to quickly capture a likeness, learning how to create accurate "block ins" of the head. 

We’ll make an abstracted head to simplify the head into its secondary forms without details.

There will then be lessons on the anatomy of the head and neck that will cover the bones and important bony landmarks of the skull as well as the muscles of the head and neck.

We will then move on to the individual facial features and use study boards to practice sculpting the eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and hair. 

Once we've built a strong foundation we will then sculpt a self portrait sculpture. I'll walk you through the 10 steps to a successful portrait sculpture. 

we will go over common mistakes in portrait sculpting and a lesson on the mistakes I made during my self portrait sculpture and how to address and fix those problems in your own work. 

We'll then have some fun with various assignments like sculpting a caricature, sculpting a friend, family member or celebrity, sculpting from imagination, sculpting a low relief portrait, adding the head onto a gesture study figure sculpture, how to sculpt emotional expressions and more. 

The sculpting principles we'll go over can be used in various types of clay and materials. So grab some clay, set aside some sculpting time, and let's learn how to sculpt the portrait!