Teen Portrait Sculpting
Maia Williamson, Samuel Davis
July 8 – 12, 2024 (Monday – Friday, 10am – 5pm)
Schedule: 10am – 1pm workshop; 1-2pm lunch; 2 – 5pm workshop
Limit: 8 students
Age range: 13 – 18 years old
Tuition: This workshop is underwritten by a generous donor covering 40% of tuition for students accepted into the workshop. Subsidized tuition is $525. Full payment of $525 is due within 48 hours of acceptance.
All interested students must apply.
Early admission applications due by February 25, 2024 at 11:59pm EST.
Notification by March 5, 2024.
*Applications will continue to be reviewed on a rolling basis until workshop & wait lists are filled. Notification within 7-10 days.
Upon acceptance, register within 48 hours to confirm spot.
“When I applied to the Teen Drawing Boot Camp, I was interested in figurative art (specifically sculpture) and was looking for the best environment to improve my work. My first week at GCA, I saw a level of dedication that I had not encountered before. The students possessed commitment and drive that surpassed my own, and the instructors were genuinely invested in each student’s success. I felt progress in my understanding and saw development in my work like I had not seen before. I started looking into applying to the core program one week into the boot camp.”
-Sam Davis, current GCA Core student, who took Boot Camp as a teen.
Course Description
This workshop will equip you with all the necessary tools to sculpt a lifelike portrait. You will learn all the basics of working from life, from how to set up an armature, take and record measurements, and manage clay. You will learn our approach to the block-in, and progress to finding likeness in skull shape, identifying important structural landmarks along the way. The course will feature demonstration and hands-on instruction on building the features, finding likeness in the character of the nose, mouth, and eyes. We will touch on hair design, gesture, and eye direction as ways to push naturalism and bring the portrait to life. With co-teachers, Maia and Sam, you will be able to witness a portrait demonstration progress from start to finish alongside your own piece.
Schedule
Day 1:
- Sculpture orientation
- Materials overview (armature, stands, tools)
- Clay management
- Basics of working observationally (perspective, movement, working globally, general-to-specific, symmetry)
- Block-in basics
- How to place the armature
- Building symmetrically with a centerline
- Clay handling
- Setting scale/proportions with measurements
- What/how to measure
- How to record measurements
- Finish with block-ins at scale with the basic skull shape
Day 2
- Begin to refine skull shape
- Taking more specific measurements (tragal triangulation)
- Identify the most important anatomical landmarks
- Place ears
- Block-in neck and cropped shoulders
- Finish with a more developed likeness and refined skull structure featuring anatomical landmarks
Day 3:
- Continue refining skull shape to achieve likeness in structure and proportion
- Block-in hair (demonstration on hair design)
- Determine the placement of the features
- Finish with skull structure locked in, hair blocked in, and features tentatively placed
Day 4:
- Consider the abstract volumes of the features
- How to sculpt the volumes of the mouth and not just lips
- Demos on how to conceptualize the structure of the features
- Lock-in placement of the features
- Begin to block-in the features
- Nose
- Mouth
- Eyes
- Finish with features blocked-in
Day 5:
- Continue to refine features
- Consider gesture of the portrait/eye direction
- How to use the rake to model the forms of the face
- How to appropriately consider surface/texture
- Group “Critique” where all portraits are observed as a group with discussion about the experience
