Free online courseSculpture Course

Course Description

Improve your sculpting technique by learning how to build believable human forms from the ground up. This free online course focuses on the practical skills that take you from individual facial features to a cohesive portrait, helping you create work that looks intentional, balanced, and full of life. Whether you are new to clay or returning to the craft after a break, you will develop habits used in studio practice to shape, measure, refine, and correct your sculpture with confidence.

You will start by working through key facial features, training your eye to recognize structure rather than guessing at surface details. By shaping the nose, eye area, ears, and mouth, you learn how each form is constructed and why small decisions in proportion change the likeness dramatically. Instead of treating features as isolated parts, you practice building them in relation to surrounding planes, which is essential for realism and for avoiding a flat, mask-like result.

As you progress, the course shifts into the bigger challenge of sculpting the face as a unified whole. You will learn to rely on simple measurements and symmetry checks to set strong foundations early, saving time later when refining. The lessons emphasize how facial features interconnect, so adjustments remain consistent across the sculpture, improving accuracy while still allowing for artistic choices and style.

You will also gain professional craft skills by constructing an armature and sculpting a head in the round. This approach teaches you to think in three dimensions from every angle, strengthen structure, and work efficiently with material. Finally, you will learn a practical workflow for adding detail without overworking one area too soon, developing multiple features together to keep proportions aligned and the expression coherent.

By the end, you will have a clearer process for sculpting realistic portraits and a stronger foundation for moving into character design, figurative sculpture, or commissioned craft work. The exercises help you build a portfolio-ready outcome and a repeatable method you can apply to future projects.