Mixing Sculpting Materials: What You Need to Know
If you don’t have much experience, you might be tempted to mix materials. Before you do, read this article—it might save you some serious headaches.
4 November 2025
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Creating a good portrait is one of sculpture’s greatest challenges. I’ve completed many portraits throughout my career, and I can tell you that capturing true likeness is difficult. However, I’ll guide you through a step-by-step approach that works especially well for those with limited experience. While experienced sculptors often work more organically and intuitively, like I do in the video above these lines. The method I outline here proves valuable in any scenario.
Before diving into details, remember this crucial point: you must visualize the hair from the beginning. You don’t need to shape it immediately, but you need to see where it sits to get a complete image of your subject. Without considering the hair, achieving likeness becomes significantly harder.
Begin by creating your “blank canvas” using my foundational method. Once you have this base, shape the head using profile views to establish accuracy. First, trace the profile view contour, then the front view contour. This gives you a solid foundation to build upon.
Next, find the lines that will guide you through the work. You’ll need both horizontal and vertical reference lines:
Horizontal lines mark:
Vertical lines define:
With this grid mapped out, you now have a clear system for placing all features exactly where they belong.
Now that you have your grid and contours traced, it’s time to add depth. Study your subject from four critical angles: 3/4 view from left back and from right back, and again 3/4 from front view left and right. This multi-angle approach helps you trace facial contours more accurately.
Define the depth of eye sockets, cheekbones, chin, and lip volume during this stage. For the inner corners of the eyes, refer back to your profile view to determine how much the eyes protrude forward.
After tracing all contours, begin shaping the face while continuously checking your work against the reference. Keep examining the contours from all angles to maintain accuracy. At some point, the face’s likeness should start emerging. You’re still sketching at this stage, but you’re building a solid foundation.
Now you can begin tracing the eye and lip lines into your work. Important note: If you lack drawing experience, practice these lines separately first. They’re crucial for achieving likeness—if executed too loosely, your results will suffer.
Also add basic volume for the ears. Keep this sketchy; you don’t need detailed ear shapes yet, just correct contour and size placement.
With your foundation in place, start recreating individual features. Each feature requires its own approach—techniques I demonstrate in my workshops and courses. Focus on ensuring depth, lines, and forms are as accurate as possible. This attention to detail ensures successful results.
This is where the work becomes both challenging and exciting. Taking time to execute this stage properly will significantly improve your final outcome.
If you can complete this process and create a recognizable likeness, congratulations—you definitely have the skill for portrait sculpture. Keep developing it.
Want more realistic results? If you’ve achieved basic likeness but feel unsure about your technique and want to push further, you’re in a good place. This means you’ve successfully reached this level but want more control over your results.
While practice is essential, learning sculptural language more consistently will help tremendously. Just as drawing is a language that translates perception into 2D format using pencils, perspective, and gradations, sculpture has its own language focused on form control.
In sculpture, light and shadows are real, not recreated. Sculptural language centers on geometry. Take the eye, for example: to create a successful eye, you must understand the eyeball’s geometry, as the eyelids and surrounding skin follow this structure. This ensures proper form and volume. The same principle applies to lips, face, head—every form follows this geometric logic.
When working with the human figure, I always recommend studying anatomy. For portraits specifically, understanding the human head’s structure helps enormously in achieving correct forms. Learning to read the bony structure beneath the skin is probably one of the most important aspects of getting portraits right.
Finally, remember that technical aspects—correct proportions, dimensions, anatomy, and sculptural language—while essential, aren’t everything. Consider this: how can a caricature artist create a drawing of you without any proportionally accurate lines yet still capture your essence so completely that you recognize yourself? There’s definitely something more at work that’s harder to explain.
What do you think that something is? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you found this guide helpful. Consider subscribing for more tips and advice, and if you’re interested in learning more about the human form, check out my workshops and online courses.
If you don’t have much experience, you might be tempted to mix materials. Before you do, read this article—it might save you some serious headaches.
I decided to put theory into practice and explore how I could apply these ideas to my own sculptures using ChatGPT — to see just how far this collaboration could take me.
AI has clearly arrived and is here to stay, creating significant concern across industries, particularly in the creative sector. While we still don’t fully understand its ultimate impact, the capabilities are simply mind-blowing.
This book is essential for learning more about the human figure as it is very complete. Includes proportions based on eight heads ( be aware that we are using 7.5 heads), bone structure explanation, balance and range of movement of the joins. The anatomy applied to the figure is not necessarily as accurate as in the Paul Richer book. This book also includes pictures of models for an applied explanation.
This book is excellent for learning anatomy from a medical perspective applied to art. Here we also find his 7.5 cannon explained. The illustrations are accurate, giving the precise location of muscles, layers and mapping of the human body. This book is used in official academies like the Florence academy.
In this book, Michel Lauricella presents both his artistic and systematic methods for drawing the human body–with drawing techniques from the écorché (showing the musculature underneath the skin) to sketches of models in action. In more than 1,000 illustrations, the human body is shown from a new perspective–from bone structure to musculature, from anatomical detail to the body in motion.
This small, portable book presents a unique perspective on the human body for artists to study and implement in their drawing work. In this book, artist and teacher Michel Lauricella simplifies the human body into basic shapes and forms, offering profound insight for artists of all kinds, sparking the imagination and improving one’s observational abilities. Rather than going the traditional route of memorizing a repertoire of poses, Lauricella instead stresses learning this small collection of forms, which can then be combined and shaped into the more complex and varied forms and postures we see in the living body.
This book provides a simplified and practical vision of the human skeleton to help all artists in their drawing studies. Here you will find the most common and useful approaches to the body’s underlying skeleton and bone structure, which will fuel your imagination and enrich your observational skills as you draw the living form. In this small, portable guide, artist and teacher Michel Lauricella focuses on the essentials you need to know.
This book is excellent for the quality of the drawings; very expressive, fresh and accurate. This book is recommended as a reference for the quality of work we can achieve in the art standards mostly applied to drawing. It is also a good source of images of bodies and living anatomy.
