Likeness Sculpt

Hey everyone, I finally got around to sculpt in Blender again. I wanted to try to sculpt a likeness, so here is what I´ve got after 2hrs of work.
It is still WIP, the mouth area needs to be refined, as well as the ears and nose, but for now I´m focusing on the large shapes.
Can you guess who I tried to sculpt? (hint: its a famous actor =D)


some different perspectives


I´m still having trouble achieving a believable likeness, I would really appreciate if you could give me feedback on what I need to improve.

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2 hrs!!! I’m going to cry… I’m so slow…
Really nice sculpture, I don’t think I know him… sorry.
For me the eye area is not working. the shape of the eye ball, and the eyelids, also the frontal cygomatic process, is too back on the head, you can almost see the hole eyeball in the side view.
also the bridge of the nose, when it goes to the cygomatic, is to flat.
But hey I don’t know your references.
Good luck!

It´s Mr. Spacey of course! :slight_smile: Nice start!
Here´s a little theory on why it´s so hard to create good likenesses (I think it´s cruicial to really reeeaaally deeply internalize this in order to develop the right attitude towards learning/practicing… well anything actually… but especially art!):

Our brains are recognition-machines! They try to fill in blancs, recognize incomplete shapes and sounds and scents all day and even at night (sidenote: I´m convinced, that dreams have a lot to do with this). They try to recognize patterns of shade, shape, volume… you get the point. That being said: it´s very easy to make something recognizable, since you only have to do one thing right and your brain will fill in the rest! Therefore we have to rethink what our goal is when creating a likeness!

Is it to make something recognizable? Obviously not, you would have reached it already! I recognized your sculpt very quickly!

Is it maybe to make it very very easy to recognize? Well… that´s better but we both know that´s still not it! We don´t want to be saying “I can very very clearly see it´s him or her, but he or she just has very funky lips here.”

We want everything to look correct. We want to make a copy!

Making a copy in and by itself is not a very artistic, it´s a rather mechanical thing to do, but still we measure the quality of fine art for exemple based on how believable the figures are which we put in all those expressive, dynamic poses! We measure the quality of abstract art in how well the shapes and colors harmonize/how well they capture beautiful patterns that we find in our world.
Therefore the more important question towards being able to create a good likeness (and ultimately beautiful art) is not “do you have the skill to make something easily recognizable?”, but rather “do you have the PATIENCE/ENDURANCE to figure out all the correct proportions?”.
What you want to do is to train your mind in:
-copying angles
-copying curvatures
-copying distances

rather than train it in:
-developing a “feeling for the right shape”.

You will, if you do this, natually develop better feeling for proportions which will make you faster in making the rough estimates but you should never rely on your feeling when it comes to the question “is what I did actually correct?/is it a likeness?”

So there´s good news and bad news. Good news: it´very straight forward! And since it´s so simple, it can be learned INCREDIBLY QUICKLY!
Bad news: It´s going to be incredibly boring, incredibly hard to find the right amount of selfdiscipline to carry on, incredibly frustrating to look for and prepare all the reference you are going to need and it´s going to FEEL LIKE it takes forever and like no progress is being made most of the time!

Whenever you are facing a big task, you want to make sure that you plan/structure your approach in a way that it keeps you motivated the whole way through. Success/achievements/rewards keep us motivated. Therefore you have to find ways to define minigoals/minisuccesses you want to have along the way towards learning to become good at making likenesses.

Nothing can be easier. Here´s my recommendation:
Start with his eyes. That´s your first goal. Create a block of clay, two spheres and sculpt only the eyelids, the bridge of the nose and the browridge on it. Look at the distance between the nose and the iris from the side, the distance between the two eyes, the curvature and angle of the eyelids, and so on. Work at it until everyone you show it to recognizes whose eyes they are. Change the viewport angles constantly/rotate the mesh, change the cameralense width constantly and always look at high resolution reference (you can delete everything around the eyes on your reference to make it even easier). Use lots of reference all the time. The more you do it now, the less you´ll have to do it later. Use the movetool/grabtool and the claybrush only and smooth a lot. Change the size of the brush back and forth a lot! (Regard this as practice. It´s okay to feel like you are bad or slow at it. I always do! But keep in mind: the more you do it, the better you will become, it´s a law of nature)
This will take a long time comparatavely (few days), but the next task will only take half as long, the one after that 1/4 and so on. In no time, you´ll become a sculpting superstar! :cool: (before next year if you are really determined)

Read this whole post a couple of times over and over, it´s pretty dense!

REMEMBER; our brains are recognition machines, they fill in the blancs! Also they do this when we read. We skip a lot of useful information because it does not appear to be useful or necessary to our minds at that moment!

Little tip: I use bingsearch for searching image references instead of google because it can easily be set up to only show high resolution results and you can flip through the results with the direction keys like you can on artstation. Huge timesaver!

Before I forget: Lieben Gruß nach Stuttgart! :smiley:

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Holly molly!!! PixelPete! were that knowledge come from!?!?!?
For the small time I have been sculpting, I can say that I feel you are totally right (ONCE MORE TIME)
I hope that the incredible quickly comes to me! haha, I think time is really important as you said, but also the way we look to things… Anyhow, Maybe some day I’ll try a proper likeness, I for sure will follow your tips.

@Tonaziuh: thanks for the comment. As pixelpete already guessed, I’m trying to sculpt Kevin Spacey.
Don’t worry about your sculpting speed, speed comes over time. Once you get the hang of your sculpting tools, you get much quicker, and if start sculpting with a very low resolution, it’s much easier to block in all the shapes. But I’m pretty sure you know this already. What brushes are you usually using? I prefer a mix of the grab and the clay strips brush. With some of the standard brush to create creases. I think these are the brushes almost everyone uses.

@pixelpete:
You are right! I tried to sculpt Kevin Spacey.
But you are also very right with what you said in the meat of your post! And all I can say is: I’ll do it! I don’t care how frustrating, or painful the learning process, I really want to be able to create kewl likenesses :D.
One thing wasn’t completely clear to me: do you think i should go in with a ruler now and measure every bit from the reference and transfer that to my sculpt, or should I rather train my eye to get these measures right in the first place? Or maybe a mixture of both? I’ll propably try out both techniques to teach my eye to become the ruler.

Grüße zurrück nach München :slight_smile:

Something else: I really feel that my anatomy skills are lacking in the head area, and i don’t seem to find too much about it. Any good reads or preferably even videos (i prefer those for learning) which are possibly free? (Every artist is broke, right?)

Thanks to everyone for the help so far, this will be an interesting journey!

Your level of frustration will naturally dictate how much you use the ruler to actually measure things. This goes for anything in life: if you really don´t know how else to progress, but you really want to progress, you´ll more likely use a cheat in order to be able to progress (just like in video games). The ruler is a cheat in the game called “developing the artistic eye”. Try to keep it to a minimum.

Most importantly: it is -like I elaborated in my previous post- very important not to eyeball things based on how accurate they FEEL! What you think while you do things is what will determine how effectively you are doin them. So instead of having the thought process of “does this feel right? No? Maybe a little to the left, a little to the right?..” you want to think like this: "The outer corner of the eye is about 2 milimeters lower than the horizontal line you can draw through the inner corner. The upper eyelid enters the inner corner of the eye at a 35 degree angle… " Think knowledge instead of questions! So the process you want to practice/get used to is:

-Look at reference

  1. estimate vertical distance, horizontal distance, angle between to points and the straigt lines you can draw through them (in actual metric! mm, cm, degree!), keep that number in your mind
    -switch to your sculpt
  2. estimate the measurements of the same points on the sculpt you have (if you´re just starting, try to visualize them in space)
  3. decide how many mms, cms, degrees you are off (think that number, keep it in mind) (if you´re just starting from scratch, you obviously don´t need this step)
  4. adjust your sculpt accordingly (if you´re starting, create the sculpt accordingly)
    REPEAT

In the beginning this is tedious and it´s even hard to keep these steps in mind, also you might FEEL that they are unnecessary or that using mm and cm is unnecessary. (Recall what we learned about feelings in art) Having the discpline to ignore those feelings and carry through with the progress is what will determine how quickly you actually progress. The most accurate way of copying anything is to put a perfect grid on it and transfer the coordinates of every point onto a similar grid next to it. This is what we try to accomplish in our mind but since our mind isn´t strong enough to visualize a perfect grid, we have to simplify the process by using cheats such as angles, curvature, relationships/proportion, and so on. With perfect discipline you can probably get used to working like this (thinking in measurements) within a day or two (couple of hours). If you find it hard to get yourself to think, practice thinking out loud.

youtube videos on facial anatomy if you get stuck and feel like you need them; I would stay away from anatomy as much as possible while developing my eye. It´s only an additional source of potential frustration. It doesn´t matter in my experience whether you start your sculpting jurney learning anatomy first or developing your eye for proportions first or doing a mixture of both right away like Toniatiuh did (with slightly bigger emphasis on anatomical knowledge, because he already had it to begin with! He didn´t progress so quickly because that´s the route he took but because he is a BADASS. Everyone learning art takes the same amount of beating/has to go through similar steps but if you´re a BADASS, and look at it like “whatever problem comes my way, I´ll figure it out, learn from it and move on as quickly as I can” instead of getting back to thinking “man, this is so hard, I don´t know what to do, I don´t know where to start” over and over again, you´ll naturally much more likely progress much quicker). Your personality will determine which way (eyedevelopment first, anatomy/knowledge development first, both right away) you can progress fastest. It´s the way that feels most comfortable to you. THIS is where feelings are useful! When there are actual choices and the best one is the one that eliminates potential for unnecessary frustration/conflict/negative consequences in general. Remind yourself that when doing a likeness, you have no choices, your reference dictates what is correct and what isn´t.

I haven´t seen any of these videos myself, so I don´t know what to recommend. My knowledge of facial anatomy comes from books, photos and skull sketcher:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=face+anatomy

I´m looking forward to seing your progress, buddy!!!

You probably know most of the above already. :slight_smile: Maybe someone else is or will be watching who finds/will find this informative. For those who feel like they want to learn anatomy first, I recommend reading through this thread: https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?404007-Human-proportions Like I said: this guy is a BEAST, his work ethic is inspiring and can serve as a great exemple for all of us! The thread also includes all of the rules of thumb, tricks and methods/cheats I have ever used and still use when sculpting from imagination/ based on knowledge of anatomy. (which is a very different workflow from sculpting a likeness. It´s very useful to really understand the differences and to be able to sepperate the two)

Very! I’m still at the - scrambling about in the dark - stage. Pretty much everything you’ve said on this forum over the last couple of months since I joined have been useful to me.

PixelPete is on the spot here :wink:

And few simple notes that also apply to sculpting (form finding), just in different medium

Come on PixelPete! you make me proud of myself for a moment!! haha then I realize I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing when I am sculpting haha. But yes, I don’t worry about what I think of myself, I am determine on going on. And I can assure you I get so frustrating some times. But who cares?

At the beginning I wanted to make a perfect human just from my mind because I had the anatomical knowledge to name all the parts of the body, but that… is just not possible for me, I don’t know if it will be possible in the future, but for know I don’t think in that anymore it always end up not been accurate, and been just… ok, I realize I wasn’t going anywhere in that direction, so I just go back to my eye, to the references, I still not good at looking at the references, but I’ll try to do as you said and start going for what I can measure with my mind. angles, degrees, lines etc… I’m not in the likeness business for know, but I think if I want to go there, now I know haw not to do it: imaging, feeling, fixing with out looking hard to the references, just from one or to photos, trying to put the anatomy because you know that it is there even if you don’t see it in the references, feeling attach with your work… this are things I did… and I try to stay away from them as much as I can.

Anyhow, this is harder than it looks and it looks hard, but been self motivated, frustrate resistant, and ignoring your feelings and not breaking your computer every time things don’t go according to plan. Because as you said it is not difficult to do, it is just really difficult for your brain to stop doing his thing, and start doing what you told him to do.

@CG sky I can assure you that anatomical knowledge wont make you a great sculptor, but hey it is a great knowledge to have, I love it, I study all the time anatomy, I teach anatomy, I live touching anatomy all the time, every day I touch bodies with pain and I have to search for the muscles, and the tendons and the ligaments, and I have to look at how the move or how the don’t move, and I love it. But I don’t see it so essential for sculpture, at least not at the degree I have, just the basic bones, the basic muscles, but it is more important to know how that is important because you can see them in the skin, and they make volumes, but the exact form, and the exact place, you should pick that up from the references, because anatomy is so much different from one person to an other in terms of detail, just knowing where things are, and the big muscles and bones, and the important landmarks (like were are the bones expose to the skin) is more than enough. But I’m just starting, from one or to years from know I will know more if this is right or not.
In terms of brush… I am a total mess… but I use, the move tool, the snake tool, the clay strips, the F Crease and the F Pinch (so little) I use the sculptDraw, and the Inflate/defl (love it) also the shift smooth and the Scrape tool, the rest… I just don’t have use of them for know. Ahh and some times I use the mask tool. As you can see, a total mess hehe, I just use what it works in that time.

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