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As promised, here are some pictures of the figure sculpture I made during February/March. He has no toes and only one hand, and is generally pretty rough and missing a lot of information. Not to mention that he has a generic head that I mostly made after class without the model there.

I’ve done figure drawing before, but this class was the first time I sculpted from a live model. Even though this piece is pretty rough, it was sort of a milestone because I put more/finer detail into it than I have into previous sculptures of invented figures and characters. I became somewhat familiar with new tools and a new kind of clay, and of course it helped me better understand some anatomical forms and forces. To name a few:

• The thigh muscles attach pretty low, wrapping around the sides of the knee, and the calf muscles attach pretty high behind it, sort of like interlocking pieces.
• The chest is rounder and meatier on the outside and bottom, whereas the bones are more prominent and the form seems flatter towards the top/center
• There were areas of loose or compressed flesh in the back, which is the type of thing I don’t usually think about. So it was good to have a live model to see this, although it’s not really apparent in the final sculpture. How pronounced it is seems to be very dependent on the pose and the lighting.
• The muscles and planes of the back are something I’ve been trying to learn more about in the past year or so, and the observation that went into this sculpture helped to clarify some things, like the abrupt concave/convex shifts around the spine of the shoulder blade and all the overlapping muscles in the neighborhood.

I still have a lot to learn. I mean this in a general sense, but I also have several specific areas that I want to study in depth, so I’m really looking forward to starting another figure next week when another round of class begins. I think the pose will be more complicated with more bends or overlapping forms, so it may prove even more challenging to ‘finish’ the next sculpture. Maybe I’ll end up focusing a bit more on the gesture or rhythm, but I tend to get pretty interested in individual structures and how things work and fit together.

Oh yeah and this may be slightly amusing or interesting if you’re really bored. Here is a picture of an earlier stage of the sculpture, when he was huge-headed, handless, and hunchbacked due to a fall.