Figurative Exercises

Some of the core goals of PVPA are to foster learning through the arts, and to nurture critical and creative thinking. In this respect, the challenges of working with clay or any visual art media should be approached as a discipline that can be learned with conscious practice. Through this section of the course, students will be practice their ability to analyze shape and form. Through a series of extended figurative exercises working with oil base clay, students will gain familiarity in additive sculpting techniques. Some of these will be replicating ones own features such as a thumb, but we will also use other models in the class for sculpting features such as facial features.

While every sculpting materials has it's own qualities and challenges, the ability to recognize shape and form is crucial to working in any medium. Here are a few suggestions as students approach these exercises:

-Work larger than life. Many may feel a small scale subject easier to approach, but slight imperfections in form will be proportionately larger.

-Add or remove material. On first approach, most students will press and squeeze clay into the right shape. This only will create a bulge elsewhere in ones work. Protrusions from ones ideal form should be removed by cutting or carving, and clay added to areas as needed.

-Observe the profile of subject and sculpture. Rather than relying on one's depth perception to judge levels of features as they move towards or away from the viewer, Most sculptors will be able to more easily see the shape and lines created by the profiles of a form. Students will be urged to constantly look at subject matter from different angles and turn their sculpture to match the view.

-Use tools to measure. While developing the skill to compare and analyze proportions, utilizing rulers and calipers to take measurements of both subject and sculpture can help those who may not easily be able to immediately asses these relationships. We will approach how to calculate scale factors in percentages or decimals , and practice utilizing these to find relative proportions in objects that do not share the same size.