Figure as Form & Light – Relief Sculpture and Figure Drawing
Erika Kyriaki Demetriou, Heather Personett
August 12 – 16 & 19 – 23, 2024 (Monday – Friday, 10am – 5pm)
Schedule: 10am – 1pm workshop; 1-2pm lunch; 2 – 5pm workshop
Limit: 8 students
Tuition: $1,825 ($912.50 deposit upon enrollment) Clay is provided.
Tuition balance is due by July 1, 2024.
Intended for intermediate-advanced students. Both 2D and 3D artists encouraged to apply.
There may be a few A la Carte Openings for $875/week. Interested artists will be notified of availability in the weeks leading up to the workshop. Click here to sign up for the waitlist and to read further guidelines. Priority given to participants who sign up for both weeks. If openings remain in either week, each slot can be filled individually.
Course Description
Description:
Over the course of two weeks, students will learn how to strengthen their three-dimensional form understanding of the figure through two complementary approaches to the same subject.
In the first week, students will work from life to create a low-relief sculpture of a standing pose in clay. The focus will be to investigate the important components of the model’s basic structures, proportions, plane directions and gesture, while in consideration of the artist’s perspective. Through the creation of their three-dimensional “drawing”, or low-relief, students will begin to understand how to decode the figure’s gesture in terms of space, plane directions, and volume.
In the second week, students will study the same model and gesture in two dimensions from a conceptual drawing approach. In this way, students can more specifically focus on understanding the ways that light interacts with volume to inform their conceptual form understanding. Students will learn how the knowledge of the underlying structure aids in their exploration of light and shadow over the figure’s gesture. The incorporation of three-dimensional conceptual form as it relates to rendering volume in two dimensions is the principal philosophy of GCA’s unique approach to academic art training.
Each week of classes will include instructor demos as well as personalized critiques. Examples of historical relief sculpture and figure drawings will be shared.
*An optional 2-day moldmaking workshop will be offered to students in between these two weeks (Sat and Sun) to mold and cast their relief sculpture for future preservation, and as reference for their drawing, if desired. More details will be shared in class. Note that wet clay sculptures over the armature cannot be fired and cannot be preserved on its own. Fee covers materials and class instruction. For any questions, please feel free to reach out.
Course Outline
Week 1: Relief Sculpture
Day One:
- How to set up your relief sculpture
- Drawing the figure in clay
- Understanding volume as planar structures
Day Two:
- Stacking volumetric shapes in space
- Utilizing perspective to understand planar directions
Days Three and Four:
- Form transitions and investigating distances in space
- Refinement of forms
- Maintaining perspective and foreshortening as you build volume
Day Five:
- Final resolution and discussions
Week 2: Figure Drawing
Days 1-2: Develop a Figure Block- In
1) Determine accurate figurative proportions
2) Identify the gesture and structure of the pose (the underlying geometries of the figure and the relationship between the large anatomical masses)
3) Identify the direction of light on the figure and characterize shadow shapes.
Day 3-5: Rendering the Figure
1) Identify the large turn of the form towards the light
2) Key shadows and render your first form on the figure to key the range of the drawing
3) Implement window method to render each subsequent form, relating it back to the volumes identified and their relationship to the light source