So we have Hi, I'm David. I'm a sculptor from Los Angeles. I'm gonna be doing a lesson and demo on sculpting portraits. I've been working with models for 25 years maybe and still every single time I've learned so much. I'll talk to you about how I design and build the armature and then we'll get started with measuring the model. The next step is that I'm going to lay in the profile of the model in between those nails and then I'm gonna continue around the entire head. You can study anatomy and you can study kinesthiology and get a convincing human head but a portrait is really different, a portrait is a deep understanding of an individual. And the real challenge is to make it an interesting dynamic, layered, nuanced sculpture. You have to have the patience to figure out the connections and what makes someone really feel the way they feel to you. Hi, I'm David. I'm a sculptor from Los Angeles and I'm gonna be doing a lesson and demo on sculpting portraits. And I've brought a couple of three quarter life sized portraits which is what I'm gonna be doing a demo of today. These have both been sculpted in portrait sculpting class that I teach in Los Angeles. They've both been sculpted using generally the same methods, the same tools, and the same approach but I've used slightly different finishing techniques on each one, which is why I've brought them in to show you. So I'm gonna turn them and take a closer look at them. And I wanna point out a few things. in the pieces that I've done and that I'm gonna be showing you how to deal with in this lesson. So here, here - you may have to get pretty tight on this to see this clearly - yeah there we go. So here you can see that there's a nail embedded in the clay, another one here, another one here, and another one in the chin here. There are also two on either side of the head in the specific anatomical point in the ear that I'm going to be point out. And those are there to give me a very, very precise beginning to the process so I know exactly where key features are going to end up. And they allow me really to look at the forms that I'm seeing in a much more specific way because I already know where things need to be, not just linearly, in other words up and down, but also depth wise. So these points give me the height, for example on - why don't I switch to this portrait - on her this point represents where the hair begins and the forehead ends. Or where the forehead ends and the hair begins. Here you can see this point represents the spot right at the top of her eyebrows and as we go through the process I'll explain exactly how I select these points on each model. Here the tip of the nose, here the tip of the chin. And if I know, for example, where the tip of the nose is and where the tip of the chin is, I can look exactly at where the top of the upper lip is, where the bottom of the lower lip is, where the center of the mouth is within that interval in a really specific way without worrying that my whole nose is too long or too short. So those points are really key to establishing the likeness of the model, to make the sculpture look very, very close to the model very, very quickly. And so you can see that each one of these have a movement to them. You know I've shifted the position of the head relative to the neck and the shoulders and that doesn't come until later in process. So when I work today with our model Paul, I'm going to start with him facing forward with his shoulders squared, his eyes straight forward and then later in the process I'll be able to shift where he's looking and get a better feel for his personality in the piece, which is what, ultimately for me, the portrait is about. It's not just creating something that looks like the model, it's creating something that really feels like the personality of the model. And that's what I was trying to do in these two pieces. I tend, in teaching situations, to work a little bit smaller than life size, only because it allows me to move more quickly. This same technique can be applied to life size, over life size, smaller than what I have here but this scale allows me to get, you know, a reasonable amount of information and detail into the piece while moving at a pretty good pace. So I'm going to move these pieces, get the armature ready, and then I'll talk to you about how I design and build the armature. So now I'm gonna get the armature that I've prepared and explain a little bit about how I put it together. So this is the armature that I use to do a portrait. It's just a piece of three quarter inch plywood suspended on these two wooden feet. And the wooden feet are there just to raise it off the ground because this phalange at the bottom is bolted on and those bolts, if I didn't have the little feet, would make the board tilt back and forth. The phalange and the pipe can be any diameter. This particular one is a half inch phalange. You can use three quarter inch, one inch, it doesn't really matter. They're both steel. One is galvanized, one isn't. None of that really matters you just want something that's fairly strong. This one is a six inch piece of pipe. Onto that I've used two hose clamps to hold aluminum armature wire, which I've just bent into kind of a rough, old fashioned light bulb shape. Roughly the size of my fist. You don't really need anything measured out for this, the only requirement for the armature is that this upper part of the armature be at least an inch smaller than the head that you want to create over it. So here I can always squeeze that down even more to make it smaller. And that's essentially all it is. You can see from the side view that I've bent this part forward and then this part straight up. And that will give me the depth of the neck so the neck will be coming through here, the chest will be coming down here, the chin will be coming out here. If I don't have that I run the risk of ending up hitting the pipe when I go in to create the pit of the neck. So that's why I've bent it forward here. The next thing I'm going to want to do is get rid of this open area in the middle. You can fill this completely with clay but it will end up making your piece heavier and you'll end up wasting a lot more clay. So what I like to do is fill the inside with aluminum foil because you can crush it down, cover it with more aluminum foil and if you ever run into it during the process, if you've made a mistake and you've kind of got the aluminum foil too close to the surface, you can just push it in and it'll stay where you put it. There are other people who use foam and will fill that with foam. And that works just as well, the only issue with that is if you do run into it you have to carve it out and the little bits of foam can get into the clay. So I have a big roll of aluminum foil. I'm going to begin just with a big piece crushing it up and packing it down. And I'm just gonna continue from the bottom up to fill that open area And for this process I like to really pack it as tightly as I can because if I then begin to add clay over it and I haven't packed it down the clay will just kind of fill that empty space and that's what I'm trying to avoid, trying to get the aluminum foil to fill the space for me. (building) Okay so there's one little gap right here I'm gonna fill up. And then when I'm done with that I'm gonna start covering the entire outside of it with a sheet of aluminum foil. And that way if any of those little pieces of aluminum foil shift around they're not gonna fall out. Maybe one more. For a portrait this portion is really not very precise. I'm still way inside of the sculpture. And so that's it. That's kind of all prepped and ready to go. From this point, the next thing I'll do - I'm sort of looking and evaluating if it's centered. I like to have my pipe roughly centered on the board. The head is facing one side of the board. And then if the neck is coming out here. I'd want it to face not the corner but one of the four sides. You may also notice that I have a piece of tape on the bottom here. And that tape is there - I've got a line right there which is just a random pen mark - and that is where I'm gonna begin all my measurements. And all the measurements that I take directly from the model are going to stay here on the bottom of the board. And obviously if you're taking measurements from the model you want to have them recorded somewhere. And over the years I've taken to recording them directly on the board that I'm working on because if I have multiple portraits that I'm working on at the same time, there have been times when I've kept them on various pieces of paper and I changed an entire portrait because I was checking the measurements and I didn't realize that the measurements that I was checking were from a different model. And so I had to redo the entire portrait again. So if you keep the measurements taped to the board, you can't mistake one model for another. So that's why that's there. I am going to be using a clay made by Chavant called NSP medium. You can use almost any clay, you can use water based clay, which works really beautifully, you can use various types of oil based clay. This is one type of oil based clay. This NSP medium is made by Chavant, which is one of the big companies that makes oil based clay. NSP stands for non sulphurated plasteline. It comes in soft, medium, and hard. The NSP is a little bit of a shorter kind of a clay than other clays, by which I mean that get a knife to open this - that when you take off a piece, and push it down and then pull on it it doesn't spread out in a really long ribbon. Do that again for you. (sculpting) So it tends to break if you try and spread it out in a long ribbon. So this clay for me I really like using it for portraits because it's a little bit stiffer, little bit firmer, a little bit easier to get the information that you're putting in to hold and not blue or soften when you begin to change the things around it. In other words if you're working on an eye and you're then moving around to the eyebrow, if you accidentally touch the eye this clay is stiff enough to hold that form and yet it's also fluid enough also to sketch with pretty easily. So the NSP I'm going to heat and then apply over this entire form. And once I have a base of clay that's about a half inch thick, then I'm going to begin to take the measurements from the model and put them into this essentially oval of what will be clay. And that will give me the entire structure of the head. So I have the foil built up over the armature and now I'm just going to begin adding clay over the foil and the clay especially when you use oil based clay, if you're using water based clay it can just kinda start putting it on right away. When you're using oil based clay you want to heat it up, especially for this part because you're just adding quite a lot of clay in a short amount of time. Later on in the process I will not heat the clay up at all or maybe I'll heat it up a little bit less. Kind of really more refining things. But at this stage the warmer the clay, the faster this will go. Unfortunately right now this clay is not as warm as it could be so it'll take a little bit longer to build up. But what I'm really looking for right now is a thick enough base of clay so that the nails that I put into it will not move. So if the clay is too thin, the nail will go right through it into the foil and it won't really hold the position of the nail as I continue to work. (sculpting) When you have new clay, which is what I'm working with, sometimes it helps to roll the clay in your hand if you look at that clay it's got all that kind of air gaps and so rolling the clay will blend all that together. (sculpting) Also if you're heating the clay and in this case I have essentially a box with a heater in it, generally the clay will be heated from the outside in and so the outside will be a little bit warmer or sometimes a lot warmer than the inside. And so rolling the clay will help even that out and take the different temperatures of the clay, you can see again, when I begin with the clay it sort of cracked and rolling that will get the oil in the clay more evenly distributed and make it easier to add. (sculpting) This part goes a lot quicker with water based clay. And water based clay and oil based clay are essentially made from the same material. There's clay body, which is a type of dirt that is dug up and dried and then crushed into a powder and with water based clay you reintroduce water to it and blend it and then you begin to work with it. With oil based clay they take the same clay and instead of adding water they add obviously oil and sometimes they add wax and lanolin. Frequently they'll add some sort of color like in the case of what I'm using now is a brown clay. They'll also do green and those are just powdered pigment that they'll add to the clay to change the color. (sculpting) Now the difference between water based clay and oil based clay is pretty profound given that material is essentially the same with the only difference being the addition of water or oil. When you add heat to water based clay it dries it and ultimately vitrifies it which means essentially it turns it to glass because the basis of all clay is silica which is the base of glass. So when you heat clay in a kiln you're essentially melting those little bits of silica and they fuse together. But when you heat up oil based clay, so in essence when you heat water based clay it turns hard and when you heat oil based clay it turns soft. So you would never want to try and heat up water based clay to make it more workable. To make water based clay more workable you just add more water. You can change the property of oil based clay and make it softer by melting it to either a liquid in the case of the NSP that I'm using you can melt it to a kind of very goopy liquid and then while it's liquid you can add vaseline to it. And when it hardens again it'll harden as a softer blend of clay. Other clays there's a type of clay or a product made by Chavant which is the same company that makes the NSP that I'm using that's called Le Beau Touche. And Le Beau Touche when you heat it it never quite turns to a liquid. I'm not really sure what the chemical difference is between the clays are but the NSPs will turn to a liquid and the Le Beau Touche won't. Le Beau Touche is much longer than the NSP. I was explaining earlier about how when you pull on a piece of the NSP it will tend to break very quickly whereas Le Beau Touche will stretch more. I typically like to use that when I'm doing quick sketches, when I'm doing figures, things like that, where I want more of a gestural ability to move the clay around. You know of course all oil based clays generally are just trying to replicate some portion of what water based clay can do. Water based clay is a beautiful material because it encompasses all of the different types of working properties in one material. Meaning that it will go from incredibly long and fluid where you can move it around quickly and very gesturally to being incredibly rigid and tough and to a point where you can almost sand the surface of the clay by letting it dry out. The one main downside to that is that it's one directional, meaning when it's wet at the beginning of the process it's very fluid and when it's dry toward the end of the process it's very hard. But it's very, very difficult to make the dry clay turn fluid again without ruining the work that you've done. You know you can spray the piece, you can add water to it but it's hard to get the entire piece back to the kind of working properties that it had at the beginning. The oil based clay will stay the same throughout the process. And there are a lot of little tricks to get it to change in different ways. Obviously for a firm clay like what I'm using you can heat it to get it more fluid and get it almost to the point where it feels like you're working with a water based clay and then when it's at room temperature it's much harder and stiffer and will hold detail better. With softer clays, they begin at room temperature, being fairly fluid and then if you want to stiffen them up you can cool them down, either by putting them in a refrigerator or some people will use compressed air, air in a can that you would use to spray off a keyboard. If you turn that upside down and spray the clay, the refrigerant that's in the can will spray onto the clay and freeze it, making it very stiff. But I'll go into all those different working methods as we go along. (sculpting) So the oil based clay has the big advantage of not needing to be taken care of. You can leave it out, you don't ever have to cover it up, you can put it aside for a month and come back to it and it will work in the same exact way as it did when you left it, whereas water based clay will not do that. If you leave water based clay you have to cover it and even when it's covered you have to keep coming back to it and checking and adding water, otherwise it'll dry and crack. And as a professional sculptor, that's particularly problematic if you have a lot of projects and things going on it can be hard to always be taking care of a bunch of pieces that are in water based clay. Also water based clay is not really all that good for you because the silica that it's made of causes a disease called silicosis because essentially when you breathe the little bits of silica into your lungs it cuts up your lungs and causes them to scar and although I said the oil based clay has that same stuff in it the oil based clay will never turn to a powder again. It's always the same consistency so the powder in the clay that in water based clay dries out and turns to dust that you can breathe in, will never turn to dust. And so you don't have the problem, the health problems associated with water based clay. With oil based clay. And so that was kinda the big issue for me when I was younger and trying to figure out what I wanted to use. So it's a much cleaner environment if you use oil based clay. The one thing that will happen is you'll drop it on the floor and it ends up kind of like gum working itself into the floor and you have to scrape it up. Otherwise your floor will become like the surface of the moon, craters of clay everywhere and it'll never dry. But people who use water based clay their studios are always filled with dust. So you can see I'm just evenly coating the armature with clay. It's a little bit cold and so it's requiring a lot more effort to blend it in. But I'm pretty close to being there. Now theoretically it doesn't really matter what the shape is right now. Once I begin measuring all of the uneven areas of the clay will be clearly shown by the measurements and I'll be able to change it at that point. But in general at this stage I want the shape of my essentially big oval to be relatively symmetrical, relatively even. You know I'm roughly indicating here a plane change for the top of the head to the forehead. I'll begin somewhere around here to come out and create the plane of the front of the face. That will all change once I have the measurements. It'll become more refined and clear. But if I can do a little bit now that's less work I'll have to do later on. (sculpting) Now I'm kinda keeping in mind where this wire is I don't want the wire to either protrude from the front, I wanna make sure I have enough depth for the pit of the neck, at the same time I don't want it popping out the back of the neck either. Whether you're working on a figure or a portrait, the ideal placement for the armature is as close to the middle of the form as you can get and the reason for that is that you're always gonna make a mistake. I mean I make them all the time. And if you miscalculate something, you want the armature to be as close to the middle as you can have it so that if, for example, I need to move everything forward a little bit, the armature won't pop out the back and if I need to move everything back a little bit it won't pop out the front. If you've started with the armature very close to the front or the back, any mistake that you make will cause the armature to come through and then, not that you can't deal with that, you know I may end up running into the armature at some point of the process and then through what you do to deal with that, how you get that armature back inside the piece where you want it to stay. The armature actually for the portrait is really pretty simple. You want it to be strong so you can see it's not moving around but you want it to have a certain amount of flexibility. So if I need to I can take the entire armature and push it back. Or push it forward and that's particularly important for when I change from how I begin, which is very neutral position, to posing the model and changing the orientation. (sculpting) So I'm getting pretty close to the point where I'm gonna want to stop playing with the clay and begin to take the measurements for (sculpting) the seven points that I'm going to put into the clay to begin the portrait. Just get rid of a few little areas that I can see the armature through. (sculpting) You know I know it's way, way, way under the volume right now. It's way too narrow front to back, it's probably slightly short top to bottom. But what I'm really looking for (sculpting) is where I'm going to place the front of the ear. So here I'm just drawing a line and I'm looking for where this deepest point of the armature is versus where that front of the ear is going to be here. If I put the back of the ear or the bottom of the ear here, the back of the ear here, that means the jaw will come down, forward that way. And I wanna make sure I have enough depth there if it's looking to me like I don't have the depth that I need all I really need to do is move that line forward, erase what I drew back here, redraw the ear a little bit further forward and I can keep moving that forward or backward until I feel like that armature is roughly centered in the form. That will depend a lot of the model, their posture, the angle that I've put here which is, you know, fairly severe. So I'm thinking I'll put this a little further back. here. And then I'm going to look at the mass overall, top to bottom, and place a horizontal line just a little bit lower than midway, you know, if that's mass, you know, midway is somewhere in here. I'm gonna go a little bit lower than midway. And that's where I'm going to begin putting my measurements. So I'm gonna leave it at this point and begin to get ready to take the measurements. 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Start your free trial today at NMA.art. our model Paul So we have sitting here and I'm gonna explain a little bit about where the measurements that I'm gonna be taking are being taken from on the model and a little bit about why I'm taking them from these particular points. So I'll start out by pointing out where these points are exactly, I'll give you a couple of terms that I'm gonna be using and then I'll explain why these points and not others. So the first point that I want to talk about is called the antitragul notch. And that is gonna be right here on the ear. So that this point right here, this little structure is called the tragus. And opposite that right here is the antitragus. And the notch in between them at the very bottom is called the antitragul notch. And it's hard, it's a little piece of cartilage. And the reason, one reason, why you take it from that point is that number one it's hard. So when you put your caliper on it, which are what these are, these are actually called dividers. Let me grab the calipers. These are calipers. Calipers are curved and dividers are straight. When you put the end of a pair of dividers or calipers on cartilage it's not gonna move as much as if you were to choose like an earlobe or something that's gonna move quite a bit when you put your calipers on it. The other reason is that notch being at the very bottom is gonna be easy to find again and again. If Paul had a tattoo of a dot, you know, on the side of his face, on either side, I would use that. The point being you want something that you can find again and again and again without a problem so that you are always measuring from the same place. So the antitragul notch is gonna be an important one. And again it's right here. Next I'm gonna be measuring from the tip of the nose, which means from the profile, the point on the nose where it comes out the furthest right before it starts turning back in, which on him is right about here. You can see the highlight on the nose right there. Next on his brow, the same thing. The point where it comes out the furthest, right before it starts turning back. And then on his chin, just rest right here. Right there, the point where it comes out the furthest is right there, fairly high on the chin. And then finally, right here. The point where his hair touches his forehead. So essentially I'm going to have the antitragul notch on both sides, so that's two points. One point for the chin, that's three, one point for the tip of the nose, that's four, one point for the brow, that's five, and one point at the hairline. That's six. Theoretically you could measure a hundred points and you'd have lots more information. The thinking behind the points that I'm taking are to try and balance the idea of making me feel very, very comfortable that I know where I am that I know where things need to be placed and also allowing me to make the majority of the decisions about how things are laid out. The more points that you put on the more that you're guided by them. And you want to be guided to a certain extent but ultimately you don't want this to become a manual version of a three dimensional scan of the model. So on one hand if you use no points you can never really be sure that anything is in the right place. And when I began sculpting that was a big problem for me. I had enough natural ability to get my sculpture to look similar to the model at the very beginning. And then as my work advanced within an individual sculpture, I began to have the problem of thinking, you know what, something's not quite right. And so the next step was to figure out what's not quite right and not have having any way to know anything with any degree of certainty I would just start to change various things. I'd say well maybe the nose is too long and so I would shorten it. And then I would say you know now the mouth looks like its got too much space and so I would shorten the chin. And then I'd say now the eyes look too low and so I would just keep changing and changing and changing things and ultimately the process worked out in an arc in the following way: initially it kind of looked pretty good and looked somewhat like the model and then as I got it more and more refined the little discrepancies between the model and the sculpture became more and more important and I would tighten and tighten and tighten and change and change and change and things looked a lot stiffer at the end rather than more natural. And what I was going for obviously was making them look more natural and once I began to figure out how to use these measurements I was able to get a certain degree of certainty about where things should be and I would never really have to change them If anything looked incorrect to me I would just check the measurements and if the measurements were right it would be some other observation, it might be the volume of something or the angle that I placed something at, so it's just a way for me to check something off, to not have to worry that the nose is too long or the chin was too low or high or the brow was too far in or out. So that's the function of the measurements. And I never want them to become an impediment to me. So toward the end of the process I might change a measurement slightly because I wanna create a certain effect. But at the point I'm pretty confident at where things should be and what's important about the structure of the head to maintain the feeling that I'm looking for. So I'll go into that more in depth as we go along but the measurements are always going to be a balance between giving you a sense of confidence that you know where you're going and not turning the process into something so mechanical that it takes your decision making out of it. So the next thing I'm going to do is taking my calipers and dividers, I'm going to show you how to take those particular measurements. So now I'm going to ask Brian to help me take these measurements. If you don't have anybody to help you, you just have to take a little bit more time to check that you're taking them accurately. I've done it you know for 20 years by myself. Recently I've been asking for help and it is definitely helpful to have a second person especially if you don't wanna poke your model too severely. So I'm gonna begin with the large calipers. These particular ones have a really big, nice nut to make it loose and tight and that makes it easy to get the measurement and then tighten it so it won't move. So Brian if you could come over, I'm gonna come around and try not to block anyone's view. I'll loosen the calipers and then we're each gonna put a caliper right on here. And if you can tighten that nut without moving the measurement. (measuring) Perfect. Okay, so now I'm gonna come back around and transfer the measurement that I just took (measuring) onto my stand. I just need to find a pen (searching) Thank you. So I'm laying one leg of the caliper on that mark that I talked about that I had randomly put on my piece of tape and add a mark. And so you can see from this point to that point is the width of the head and I'm going to mark it before I add anything else AT for antitragul notch. To AT. And so that one is done. Next I'm gonna ask Brian to come to the front of Paul. I'm gonna loosen this and what I'd like you to do is put the tip of the caliper right on the tip of his nose. I'll guide you up and down. I just want you to make sure you're centered side to side. And I'm gonna hold the other leg right on the antitragul notch. Okay down a little bit, right there, a little up. Are you right in the middle? (measuring) Perfect. This measurement. Transfer it. (measuring) And write AT because one leg of the caliper is on the AT, to nose. The second measurement. Now we're gonna do that same thing again. I'm going to loosen the calipers and we're gonna do his brow. So right up here you just find the middle and I'll guide you up or down. Right about - right about there. (measuring) Okay. (measuring) So that'll be AT (measuring) to brow We're gonna do the next one. And the next one is gonna be right where his hair meets his forehead. Again you wanna be right in the middle as perfectly in the middle as you can be. Okay. Just hold it for a second. Good. (measuring) (writing) And I'm gonna write down AT to hairline. Next we're gonna do the chin. (measuring) Right - a little bit higher - right there. It's easier the closer you hold it. Meaning if your hand is just a little bit closer, there you go, you have more control. Just relax with that hand because I'm gonna turn that. There. Down a little bit. Right there. Right in the middle. Okay. (measuring) Now for a lot of people, myself included, this part of the process is boring, very unartistic, not what I imagined sculpting to be. AT to chin. But that's it. I've done all of the measurements. I'm gonna tilt this up so you can see. So for a few of the measurements I've had to add little arrows so that you can - or not so that you can - so that I can figure out which line means what I've got all of the measurements from the antitragul notch to the chin to the nose to the brow and to the hairline. The next thing I'm going to do is using dividers I'm going to measure between those structures, so meaning between the chin and the nose, between the nose and the brow, and the brow and the hairline. And that will complete all the measurements that I have to do. I'm gonna clean a little bit of clay off. So I don't get it on Paul. And I don't need anyone to help me with these because I can see both points at once. So I'm gonna come in and very carefully measure the nose, the chin, and then transfer that measurement to my board. (measuring) I have done these before and forgotten to write them down and then you just have to do them all over again. Again now I'm gonna do nose to brow. (measuring) And then finally I'll do brow to hairline. (measuring) Brow. (writing) Okay. now I've done all of the measurements that are going to be triangulated. Now triangulation is a process by which you are going to combine three measurements into one perfectly accurate measurement. So in other words that I've talked about meaning the antitragul notch on either side of the head, the chin, the nose, the brow, and the hairline, are going to be measured in three different ways which give you the height, the width, and the depth all at once. In addition to the triangulated measurements, and I'll explain a little bit more about how that works as I do them, I'm gonna take a few untriangulated measurements. And those are just for me to get a rough idea of how big, how wide, or how deep something is. But not in a really, really precise way. It's just you know a way to give myself a rough idea. Right now I'm going to do the outer corners of his mouth, so one side of the mouth to the other. I'll do probably the width of his nose and the width of his eyes. And then I'll take a rough measurement from the nose to the very back of the head. So I'm gonna start with the width of his mouth. Raise your head up a little bit. (measuring) There. (measuring) Next I'm going to do the width of his nose. Okay. This is the width of the nose. Wow look at that. The width of the nose is almost exactly the same as the distance from the brow to the hairline. Nose width. And then this one you always wanna be very careful I'm gonna do the outside corner his eyes. Their measurements. (measuring) I'm also gonna get the measurement of one eye. You can close your eyes. (measuring) Now I'm gonna do a measurement from the tip of his nose to the furthest point back of his head. And particularly for anyone with hair that I'm sculpting I don't triangulate this measurement because, you know, his hair is gonna grow. If it's styled differently that measurement will change. It just gives me a rough indication of how big overall the sculpture needs to be. I should always loosen that a little bit. And I want it to the outer edge of the hair, not to the skull. Tighten that. And obviously this is gonna be by far the largest measurement. And that nose to back of head. So now that I have all the measurements written down on my board I need to transfer them from life size to the scale that I'm gonna be working which is three quarter life size. And to do that I'm going to use a tool called a proportional divider, which looks like this. It's got the good versions of these proportional dividers have little teeth in this groove here and there's a little trolley that rides up and down which determines what the proportional scale is. If I open these you'll see that at this end the measurement is much bigger and at this end smaller. The further over I move that center point, the smaller this end becomes and the larger that end becomes. Right now they're set for three quarters. And in order to set these you just take a ruler and measure one inch on the large end and you keep adjusting the small end until this opening here is the measurement that you're looking for. So for three quarters you would set this to one inch and this to three quarter inch and then anything then anything that you measure with this side you just flip over the dividers and you'll have the reduced measurements. So now I'm gonna turn back to the sculpture (measuring) and take each measurement with the large end and then flip them onto another line that I will set up to get the reduced measurement. I'm gonna have to go and get a roll of tape. (taping) So. So one by one I'll transfer the measurements from one side to the other. (measuring) And I will label them as I go nose width. (measuring) Brow to hairline. And what I find interesting about doing it this way, I've seen people who use this approach who keep a sheet of paper with one measurement per line. That's brow to hairline. In addition to taking up more room, it doesn't allow you to look at the measurements all in relationship to one another. And what I find interesting after doing many, many, many portraits is these become almost like barcode. Now when you look at them they show you the relationships of the different features in a very kind of graphic way. So I've done sculptures of like very, very, very attractive people and they're measurements tend to line up really, really tightly with one another. And then most eccentric looking people may have a much wider spread between some of these measurements. So that's mouth, width, that should be this one. (measuring) Nose to brow. Now nose to chin. (measuring) Sometimes it can be a challenge to get all of the writing that you need to get into a very tight space. So whatever I need to do to make it clean to myself what these lines represent. I'll try and do because it's very frustrating when you can't remember what something was referring to and even more frustrating when you change a whole lot of things on your sculpture based on not understanding what you meant by a particular note. AT to brow. A few left. So AT to brow. AT to chin. (measuring) AT to chin (measuring) AT to nose. (measuring) I was just tightening up the measurements. (measuring) So the nuts on this, on the two sides, one is for changing the proportion and one is just to tighten the tension. And unfortunately sometimes I forget which is which. And when I just wanna tighten it sometimes I end up changing the measurement and then I have to recalibrate everything. So if I were smart I would probably label them. (measuring) But I haven't yet. (measuring) I have one more. measurement (measuring) and then I'm done with the transfer. So nose to back of the head. So now I have my measurements transferred, I can put away the proportional dividers and I can begin placing these measurements into the clay. To do that I like to use finish nails, which you can get in any hardware store. You may need to get very close to see what I'm talking about here. But a finish nail will have a little bit of an indentation in it. And that way when you're measuring, when you put the tip of your caliper there, it won't slide around, it sort of tends to grab right in that little hole. And that's one of the reasons I like using them. Traditionally this was done with wooden matches. You can use anything that's relatively small and straight. So the first thing that I always do is take a pair of calipers and get my antitragul notch to antitragul notch, which I'm just going to call the AT to the AT. And that gives me what the widest measurement needs to be. And you can see I'm pretty good, I'm, you know, about a half inch under on either side. And that's really what I'm looking for. I wanna have, you know, a good amount of room on either side. So I'm gonna begin by placing the first nail into where I want the antitragul notch to be. And so I want it to be roughly in the center of the mass. Generally slightly in front of my pipe. If you can come out a little bit so you can see the pipe and the wire you can see that I've placed this a little bit in front of the pipe. Maybe I'll just go slightly back around here. And now I'm going to come around just drawing a line. And on the other side I'm gonna do that same thing. Gotta find where's a nail. And I'm gonna push the nail in. Every now and then you'll run into the armature and you can just shift the angle of the nail to avoid the armature. Now I'm going to take my calipers, which are set to the antitragul notch measurement and I'm going to adjust the nails until they exactly match the measurement. A little bit small Come out just a tiny bit. (measuring) So that's perfect. Before I do anything else, I'm gonna take a bit of warm clay and anchor those points. Because as you push them in and pull them out it's very easy for them to loosen up. (measuring) So here I'm really kinda of squeezing pretty hard to make sure they're embedded. And then I'm gonna recheck and make sure that all that moving around didn't change them. And they're still pretty good. So my next nail is going to be for the tip of the nose. So optically I'm going to try to find think the middle is going to be. (measuring) And for now I'm just going to keep it in line with the antitragul notch. I'm just gonna pop it in for a second and show how that can be adjusted. So if when I have my model back from a break I realize that the nose is too high relative to the antitragul notch because of how this armature is created, all I really need to do is tilt the entire armature and now you can see that's below the line. So the tip of the nose there is a little bit below. If I tilt that back now it's a little bit above. So once these measurements are put in, there's sort of a self correcting system. You know obviously if he tilts his head all the way down, his nose will be below his ears. if he looks at the ceiling his nose will be above his ears. And so that can all be accomplished just by bending the armature. You try and put the nails in relatively close to their final position initially but the measurements will correct any errors on your part. In other words, if he's sitting and his nose is directly in line with his antitragul notch, that's fine. If he's sitting in a way where it's slightly below eventually you can just tilt the entire sculpture to accommodate that. In fact the first thing that I do everytime my model gets back from break is check the relationship between the antitragul notch and the tip of the nose on the model and then check it on my sculpture and then I adjust the sculpture from there to accomodate how the model is sitting now. If he's sort of sitting down a little bit, he's looking down. I don't necessarily ask the model to readjust every single time. I can just take this whole thing change it slightly to match what I'm seeing in the angle and then continue with my work. So now I've put the nail in roughly where I think the center is and now I'm going to get the measurement of the AT to the tip of the nose. Find that, get it into the calipers, and then with one leg of the caliper right on the AT I will turn this so you can see I'm not - I'm a little bit off center. Just very, very slightly. So this needs to come back over - actually I don't honesty know if I'm off center of if I'm just too far in. Now that's touching. But the real proof will be from this side, which I can see I'm gonna be way, way off. So I'll hold it on here and you can see it's no where near on this side. What that means is that I've put the nail too far over in this direction. it's too close on this side, although it's very, very accurate on this side. So what needs to happen is I need to enlarge the distance on this side by pushing it in that direction. That's, unfortunately, going to shorten the distance here, which I don't want to do. So at the same time that I move it over in this direction, I'm also gonna move it out, which will lengthen this side and hopefully keep this side almost exactly the same. because I'm sticking that nail pretty far out and it's not gonna be very stable, I'm just gonna add a little bit more clay right here before I move the nail to help me keep everything stable. (sculpting) So I've moved the nail. Now one thing I need to mention is that once you've established points like these, never move them. Otherwise everything becomes a big problem. So every nail that you set, you try then to leave it where it is and not move it again. So now that side matches and this side is actually too long. So I went a little bit too far. So I'm gonna move this nail back in this direction, which will lengthen this side and shorten this side and at the same time I'm gonna move it in. Which will shorten it from this side and hopefully not change it from the other side. So now that side is right. And that side is maybe a millimeter off. So I'm gonna do the same thing again over this direction and in just a hair. Perfect on that side. Still could come just a tiny bit more over and in. Good from that side and good from that side. So now I have three points in but none of these points are triangulated. Meaning for these points I only really have two measurements. One measurement is from this side to this side and from this point to this point. And likewise for this I have from one side to the other and from this side to this side. For the nose I have from one ear to the nose, the other ear to the nose. But I don't have anything height wise. So the next measurement that I put in will begin the process of triangulation. And this measurement is always where it gets a little bit tricky because there are so many - you just saw where I did the nose I had to keep adjusting it back and forth to get it to match the two side. Now I have to get it to match three different sides. And so I'm going to show you how I get that to work. I think I'm gonna start with the nose to the chin. And at this point it doesn't really matter which one you do next. You can do nose to chin, nose to brown, brow to hairline - actually you can't do brow to hairline because you don't have the brow yet. So nose to chin or nose to brow. Either one. I'm gonna start with the measurement from the nose to the brow. But all that will tell me is the relative distance here. From here to here. It won't tell me anything about the depth. So I'm just using this, I'm gonna hold my armature in space, make sure I have the measurement really good. And you can see that the kind of chin shelf that I put in here is too high. You know optically I'm going to try and put that nail right under the previous nail. And then now that's the right length. But I'm not going to spend too much time on that because I need to get the depth and depending on how far in or out it comes, that is going to change the height. So AT to chin. (measuring) So if I turn this like that, just be able to see that the nail is sticking out way too far. (measuring) There we go. So you can clearly see the nail needed to come back. So I'm going to push the nail in. Maybe even just a half a millimeter further. Okay so that's just about percent on that side. I have a different pair of dividers that still have the measurement of the nose to the chin. You can see it's just a tiny bit you know maybe half a millimeter too low so I'm just gonna adjust that upward. That's perfect. And now I'm going to rotate 180 degrees and do from the antitragul notch and now you can see it's not in the center. It needs to come out. So I need to make that adjustment. I'm not long enough here but I'm perfect here. So I need to get longer, which means pushing it over in this direction and coming out just a little bit. Now just about perfect there. A little bit off there. But I'm going to add a little clay to stabilize it because I can feel as I'm moving it that it wants to shift around. Recheck two sides. Make some minor adjustments. It's too short there and a little too short there. So hopefully just pulling that out. Make that correct and make that correct. And now I'm gonna check the length which is pretty good. (measuring) So now I have the chin, the nose, the antitragul notches. Those are all triangulated. Meaning they're correct side to side, they're correct depth wise, and they're correct height wise. Now I only have two triangulated measurements left to take. I'm gonna start from the nose and go to the brow. So AT to the brow. (measuring) Actually with the small dividers I'm gonna do nose to brow. So I'll get a rough measurement here. (measuring) Just pop up a nail in. Adjust it, I'm just gonna check it, get from the front to see how it aligns and again I'm not super worried about get - when I put it into the clay, getting it aligned because the measurements will tell me if I'm off. So now I've put it in, now I need to get the depth. AT to brow and I'll use a different pair of dividers. If you only have one pair of calipers or dividers you can just keep changing them but since I do have multiple sets I'm going keep one set to the AT to brow and the other side to the nose to brow so I don't have to keep resetting them. So that's perfect from that side. Perfect from that side. And let's check from here to here. Perfect so only one point left to do. Same process. I'm going to find the brow to the hairline. (measuring) Get a nail. (measuring) Line it up. Pop that in and I'm kind of - I'm getting stuck because I've hit the armature in there. So I'm just gonna change the angle that I've put the nail in at because I don't care really about the shaft of the nail. (measuring) Okay double check that distance, a little bit low so I'll push it up. And now I'm going to get the AT to the hairline. (measuring) So you can see it's out too far. Push it in a little bit further. That's good. Now I'll check from the other side. And that's just a little bit off so first thing I'm gonna do is add a little bit of clay there to stabilize it then move it over and out just a hair. Check it again, still under. Out just a little bit. (measuring) Check the other side. Perfect. And now, finally, I'm going to check the length between them. And that's pretty good. The one additional measurement that I'm going to put in which is going to be a, you know, less precise than the ones I just did is the length from the tip of the nose to the back of the head. it's gonna be a big measurement but it'll give me an indication of how much clay I need to pack onto this before I can really get going. So here is that measurement. Turn that to the profile so you can see it. And from the tip of the nose you can see I have quite a bit. Maybe I can do this in a way that's better. Easier to see. I've gotta add that much clay to the back. So that's kind of helpful to know at this stage, that I need that much more. So I'm just gonna lay on some clay. And once I've got that volume added, now the clay is nice and warm and soft. (measuring) So as I add that clay, I can just kinda keep checking. (measuring) Now when I'm at this stage in the process I try to keep everything relatively narrow, meaning from the two profiles I wanna see the entire width, but from the front and the back I want it to stay very narrow until I'm really, really confident that everything is in the right location and the right projection and the right shape and at that point I'll add the width and the volume. But the narrower I can keep it now, the easier it'll be for me to change the drawing of the profile as I begin my work with the model. So again I'm gonna recheck. I'm pretty close. I'm just gonna add a tiny, tiny bit more going down here (measuring) and then I'll have the model come back and begin to lay in his profile. So here I've got all of my measurements taken. I know the nose will end here, the chin will end here, the brow will end here, the hair will begin here and come up, the head won't project much more than, you know, a tiny bit further here. And then as I build my profile, I'll come down the pit of his neck and his shoulder. So here you can see measurements in life size that I've written down. Everything begins at that point, so one leg of your caliper or divider will always go on that point and then all of the other measurements are labeled. So here is the width of the eyes, one eye to another, the nose to the chin, etc. Above I have all of the measurements at three quarters scale. And as I was mentioning just sort of that layout is really indicative to me of not that I could look at this and image what somebody would look like but it does tell me quite a bit about what the model looks like when these measurements are all very similar, for example AT to the chin to the tip of the nose to the brow and to the hairline, you get a sense that somebody gets a very kind of classic look, very chiseled or model like because the nose, the chin, the brow, all follow this arc where they're almost equidistant from the antitragul notch. Likewise, these smaller measurements here, when those all line up and there's the same distance between nose and the chin, the nose and the brow, the brow and the hairline, you also get a very kind of classical attractive model with those kinds of measurement. When one measurement is raised further out on that line it's telling you that that distance is bigger. So somebody that has a very long nose might have very similar distances with some of the measurements one that come way out. Paul actually has a fairly short forehead and so the forehead measurement, meaning the measurement of the antitragul notch to the brow - to the hairline - is usually the biggest measurement. On Paul it's the second biggest and that tells me that he doesn't have a very, you know, long distance between his brow and his hairline. So I think it's interesting how these sort of almost like graphic layout of these measurements tell you something about the model. And if you know how to read them which, you know, comes after doing portraits, you begin to see the layout and if you look at the way the portrait is laid out right now, if you look at the nails, you can see some interesting intervals. A very short distance of the hairline to the brow, a fairly long distance from the brow to the nose, and another fairly long distance from the nose to the chin. That gives you the sense that he's fairly long in his lower head and really compact on top. Also see a certain amount of information about the projection from the front of his ear to the chin. So I think it's an interesting aspect to the process that, you know, something that abstract will show you something, you know that representational. Okay so this really concludes the really annoying detailed set up where it feels more like an engineering project than a sculpture project. But one of the big benefits of doing this is you get all of this stuff out of the way at the beginning. From this point on I'm going to be relying very heavily on my eye and my sense and using these measurements that I've taken only if I run into a problem. If I'm not sure if something is starting not to look quite right then I can always go back and check and see if one of these measurements moved if I mismeasured it in the initial set up that will help me figure out if I run into any problems. But from this point forward I'll be using these measurements but really much more relying on my eye. Hi, I'm David. I'm a sculptor from Los Angeles. I'm gonna be doing a lesson and demo on sculpting portraits. I've been working with models for 25 years maybe and still every single time I've learned so much. I'll talk to you about how I design and build the armature and then we'll get started with measuring the model. The next step is that I'm going to lay in the profile of the model in between those nails and then I'm gonna continue around the entire head. You can study anatomy and you can study kinesthiology and get a convincing human head but a portrait is really different, a portrait is a deep understanding of an individual. And the real challenge is to make it an interesting dynamic, layered, nuanced sculpture. You have to have the patience to figure out the connections and what makes someone really feel the way they feel to you.
