Portrait Sculpting Course

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.

The skull is essential to understand as the foundation for the portrait. Lessons will go over the bones and important bony landmarks of the skull.

Once we understand the skull we will go over anatomy of the muscles of the head and neck as well as the fat pads of the face that dramatically effect the facial features.

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 friend, family member or celebrity, sculpting from imagination, sculpting a low relief portrait, mold making & casting the portrait, 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!