Life Sculpture Course

Wensum Lodge is a fantastic place and provides amazing courses, so when I saw a Life Sculpture course advertised it was meant to be!

I love Life Drawing, ever since the first time at Art College where I just seemed to find something I really enjoyed and could do well, no matter what the weird brief we’d get given to test us…

At school I loved to make clay sculptures, my mum still has them inside and outside her house, so a Life Sculpture course – my idea of heaven 🙂

I really didn’t know what to expect, and how would we be able to make a sculpture from a live life model? All was revealed (bad pun!) when our lovely model lay down on a large turntable! amazing, I’ve never ever seen this in any Life drawing class, a revelation, rotate the model… it seems so obvious now.

Day 1

We had a choice of clays, a smooth white clay, a buff smooth clay and then a buff grog clay – called Crank, and that was the one for me. During my day-to-day work, I’m working really small, really fine, smooth and highly detailed, so something big and rough would give me more freedom with my sculpture.

The hours flew by and obviously our model needed to take breaks so I would say we had 4 hours with the model in front of us, being gently rotated every 15 minutes for 90 degrees.

The extension over the pillows gave a lovely stretched out feel to the pose and capturing that was what our teacher – Do Philips – told us to concentrate on rather than getting into details.

Day 2

Getting more used to the clay I started to find my style with it so I could make details, I really enjoyed the toes, which I never usually do when Life Drawing!

By the end of Day 2 I was really happy with my life sculpture in some ways I didn’t know what I would do for the last day…

Day 3

Of course the worst bit of clay sculpture, having to hollow it out to give it a chance to survive the firing. It looks so brutal and you think it will never look good again!

Had to hollow down his legs as well, and up into his neck as far as you can, going right down the board so the air can fully circulate.

Complete and he’s all back together… now we pray to the kiln gods he survives in one piece, he’s a bit of a monster sized sculpture, but I loved every second of this course, it was so freeing to go big, bold and not be precious about minute detail.