This 2-day workshop is an exciting opportunity to work with top portrait artist Hazel Reeves and is for those with a bit more experience with portraiture. It will enable you to focus on getting expression, character, emotion and movement in your sculptures. Using a different model each day, you will have the chance to sculpt in clay a series of smaller heads focusing on ways of bringing the piece to life, using texture, form, tone and the pose/composition. This concentrated modelling will be interspersed with fun exercises – with clay and without – to bring more spontaneity to your work.

Portrait sculpture is an immensely absorbing and enjoyable discovery with every new sitter. This course aims to build upon your previous experience [Intermediate/Advanced] to further how to observe and translate your observation into a clay portrait sculpture from a life model. Refresh, renew or find alternative ways of looking through group and individual discussion with your tutor, David Klein, member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors (MRBS) and the Society of Portrait Sculptors (SPS). Whether setting out a portrait head from a structural point of view with a clear path of constructive method and/or searching for a more expressive manner of approach, you will benefit from exploring with a professional sculptor to help build upon your own sculptural experience. David Klein hopes to impart a few of the tools he has learnt and explore on this course that wonderful tension between finely rendered form and unworked chaos. Portraiture is a search. This search for form, truth and personality requires tools. From the force of the neck into the weight of the head, which in so many ways defines and marks exceptional sculpture. This course will explore the structure, turning points of form, emphasis and simplification.

This course is a rare opportunity to work on a full life size figure within a small class size. Working with your tutors Laura Postle and Valentina Zlatarova, students will develop and hone the skills required to produce large scale figure work. Sculpting in both a guided environment from direct observation of a life model, as well as learning how to work self directed without a model, you will spend a five weeks fully immersed in the sculpting process. Starting with building an armature using a provided steel back iron, an approach to figure work that will be strong yet flexible, with room for interpretation, will be taught. As well as developing technical skills of measurements, plumbing, anatomy and clay application, students will hone their creative skills, develop an understanding of sculptural texture and forms, and learn how to capture the model’s unique expression to create a piece of art. To apply for this course, please send an email with a few images of your figurative sculpture work to laura@artacademy.org.uk or contact the Art Academy team at shortcourses@artacademy.org.uk