- I believe that the key to a successful portrait is good observation, a well-trained eye, an understanding of anatomy, and a little bit of magic thrown in to really bring it to life. I've been sharing pictures and videos of my sculpting processes for many years now. And since the very beginning, people have been curious to know exactly how I go about sculpting the celebrity likeness. Or how they might sculpt a portrait of a famous face or a loved one from photographs. I've sculpted over a hundred portraits for wax museums and in this course I'm going to share with you absolutely everything I've learned over the years. On how to research and sculpt just from found photographs. In this course, I'm going show you the grid method. And that's where you get a front and a profile picture blown up to life size, and you line them up and you use that as the basis for your accurate sculpture. Now, this is just an example piece of someone that I've sculpted before, Patrick Stewart. I'll show you how to line up the key points horizontally and make sure that they're both about life size and then you can actually pop off the profile and use this to put on your actual clay sculpt as a guide. If you've not sculpted a portrait before, I would strongly recommend that you take my first portrait sculpting course, Strong Foundations. And preferably the anatomy course too before trying to sculpt with this method. I will not be repeating anything that I've covered already in those courses. And I would consider this to be an advanced course for people with some prior knowledge of sculpting. This grid method can feel a little bit like sculpting by numbers, and if you don't have that prior knowledge and understanding to fall back on it can make you overly dependent on measuring every tiny detail and not trusting your own judgment. This grid method is by no means a magic path to creating a perfect likeness every single time. It still relies on you using your prior experience to make key judgments. Nobody creates a perfect likeness every single time. I certainly don't, and I've never met a sculptor who does. The most important thing is to study hard and just to give it your best shot every single time. Just as I did for Strong Foundations and Standing Strong, I've sculpted the subject twice. It's really important to me that these courses are as visually rich as possible. I know from my own experiences one of the best ways to learn is to watch a more experienced sculptor at work. For this reason, I've filmed and edited the whole process of sculpting the portrait against the black background. I will also sculpt the portrait a second time for these live action lessons, whilst talking you through the entire process. People often ask me to record sculpting a portrait in real time. Well, that's just not possible because then you'd end up with a course that was three weeks long and very boring indeed, and actually not very helpful. Ben and I have worked together to try and work out the most useful way of filming this, to help you understand what it is that I'm seeing when I'm sculpting, so that you are actually seeing the whole process through the eyes of the more experienced sculptor. It's very important to me that people know what's included in the course, and as this is going to be a free lesson, I just wanted to say very clearly that this is a sculpting course. The whole course is about the sculpting process and there won't be anything about moulding and casting or hollowing out and firing. This course is a demonstration, so due to copyright, I won't be able to include the reference file of photographs that I'll be working from. But what I will do is show you the whole process of how I research the subject, collate the file, make the front on grid, and profile, and then how I do the whole sculpting process. So then you can just apply it to anyone that you like. I really hope you enjoy the course and that you find it helpful.