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Build strong foundations, sharpen your technique, and unleash your expressive side — Learn figure sculpting with Javier, no matter where you are!
Build strong foundations, sharpen your technique, and unleash your expressive side — Learn figure sculpting with Javier, no matter where you are!
Build strong foundations, sharpen your technique, and unleash your expressive side — Learn figure sculpting with Javier, no matter where you are!
Javier Murcia runs figurative sculpting workshops across New Zealand and Australia — Workshops are hands-on immersive experiences, working in clay, and open to beginners and experienced sculptors alike.
With 30 years of experience spanning fine art and major films, Javier Murcia brings rare expertise to figure sculpture. His background in both fine arts and medical anatomy, plus five years at legendary Weta Workshop, gives him a unique perspective on the human form. Javier’s teaching style? Rigorous yet relaxed—helping you grow confidently from wherever you start.
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In the studio, I like to keep the tradition of working from a live model. This isn’t a whim — it’s based on experience. It’s a conscious choice, grounded in the real benefits that working with a live model brings to an artist.
In my career I have worked in all possible ways — basing my work on pictures, on imagination, on other artists’ work — and my conclusion comes from what I can actually perceive in the evolution of my own work.
Putting the community side of things aside — because working alongside people who share your craft is simply not the same as working alone in the solitude of your studio — there are a few things you get from working with a live model that are difficult, sometimes impossible, to get any other way. And those things can have a real, positive impact on your work.
What you gain from working with a live model falls into two categories: technical advantages and artistic advantages. On the technical side, there’s depth, accuracy and movement. On the artistic side, there’s energy.
Before I get into these, I want to point out something worth keeping in mind: almost every good sculptor you can think of has used mirrors to study themselves, whether a part of the body or the whole figure — I’ve done this myself more times than I can count, especially when I was younger. It just makes sense. You need to learn somehow, and the best model you’ll ever have access to at any hour is yourself, in front of a mirror.
Depth
When you have a model in front of you, you can do a quick visual scan — swinging your body from side to side while your eyes stay locked on one particular area you’re trying to capture. This lets you understand not just the forms of that area, but how they relate spatially to everything around them. What you’re interpreting here isn’t only anatomy — it’s geometry.
The difference with working from photographs is that a photo freezes one moment, where light and shadow are telling your eyes what they’re looking at from a single, fixed angle. Working from life, your eyes can read the forms of a volume through real interaction — through the way light and shadow shift as you move your head around the model. That’s something a picture simply can’t give you. The closest equivalent is a 3D scan of a model, which you can rotate however you like to get a better read on the forms, much as you would in real life. That’s precisely why I provide 3D scans to my online students — so they can have something closer to that experience while working at home. It’s also why the geometrical approach is so useful: it helps you measure and locate simple volumes first, which you can then break down into more complex forms later.
Accuracy
When it comes to accuracy, we rely on anatomical knowledge to navigate the body. I know where the knee sits in relation to the rest of the body because I know how to locate it using a canon of proportions. But around the knee there are several smaller landmarks I also need to know — where the head of the fibula sits, where the head of the tibia is, where the internal and external condyles are. That’s the structure of the knee, reduced to a few key points. Locating them and placing them correctly is exactly what having a real reference in front of me makes possible. Trying to do this from photographs alone is far more likely to lead to anatomical inaccuracies.
Movement
This is something only a real model in front of you can provide. Some areas of the body are simply too complex to untangle in a single, frozen pose. A good example is the pelvis — forms like the tensor fasciae latae and the sartorius, which attach at the ASIS and shift depending on the pose. Or the way the ribcage forms fade into the muscles of the belly. Or the scapula. When you’re in front of a model, you can ask them to move an arm a few times so you can understand how the muscles are actually producing the forms at the surface. Or ask them to break the pose and return to it, so you can observe how the ribcage settles and interacts with the surrounding forms.
This is a huge advantage. Once again, I try to bring this into my online courses by providing videos of models in repeated motion, focused on one specific area — say, the shoulder blade — from different angles.
So that’s the technical side of the experience, and as you can see, it makes a real difference. In many ways, though, even where it’s difficult, you can find creative ways to work around it with enough reference photos, but it never gives you the same results.
Energy
The one thing you truly cannot replace is energy.
This part is harder to put into words, but it’s just as real and just as important as everything above. Energy is something every living thing carries. Interaction with others can drain your energy or charge it, depending on the occasion and the people you’re with. Some people are intense; others are light and easy to be around. A five-year-old is full of energy the way a ninety-year-old is running low on it. A desert at three in the afternoon feels sharp and unforgiving, while a green forest energizes you almost without effort.
None of this is abstract — it’s concrete, easy to understand, and something we can all relate to, because it doesn’t appeal to reason but to something more primal in us. The same way music, words, and actions carry emotion and make us feel one way or another, forms can do the same. They can carry the strength of tension or the softness of calm, and pass that feeling on to the viewer.
Now think about this for a moment: when you make a sculpture, you’re not simply making an object meant to inspire whoever looks at it later. The object is the end result of an experience — one that leads the artist through countless decisions along the way, until the work is finished. You’re not making an object. You’re starting a journey, and that journey is full of emotion, printed into the work itself. Artists use their art as a vehicle to turn emotion into a language. For a figurative artist, the energy you get from your model is the seed that starts that journey.
I’ve had models in the past I simply couldn’t work with, because the vibe wasn’t right. That’s not a whimsical choice — it’s as simple as trying to concentrate on your work while a child is shouting in the middle of the room. Could you concentrate? It’s also why artists often talk about having a “muse” — that particular person who brings exactly the inspiration needed to produce the work.
This is why, after working every way possible, live model practice is still where I land. Working from a model is one of the most rewarding experiences an artist can have. It’s why I not only teach courses and workshops on it, but keep up a continuous practice of my own — to sharpen my skills and refine my results. And it’s something I’d invite every fellow artist to do, regardless of how accurate you’re aiming to be in your own work.
There are a few things you get from working with a live model that are difficult, sometimes impossible, to get any other way. And those things can have a real, positive impact on your work.
Quick sculpting exercises vs. finished, rendered sculptures — what each one teaches you, and why
In 2023, I was invited to join the team at Weta Workshop to help build
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