Hello everyone! I recently completed a human head sculpt, The Thinker, as part of my 4-week Blender challenge, and I’m excited to share the results with you. This project taught me a lot about sculpting, and I’d like to share some insights, challenges, and lessons I’ve learned along the way.

During this project, I realized several important things:

  • Anatomy practice is essential: I found that my knowledge of facial anatomy can get rusty if I don’t practice regularly. Continual practice is crucial for maintaining and improving my skills.
  • Handling eyes: Eyes can be tricky to sculpt, but using an extra sphere for the eyelids helped me create a more realistic and natural look.
  • Getting the rough shape right: It’s essential to nail down the rough shape before adding any details. Focusing on the overall form ensures a strong foundation for the rest of the sculpt.
  • References are key: Always use reference images to guide your work, or you might end up starting over due to inaccuracies.
  • Starting with a base mesh: If possible, start with a base mesh to save time and avoid the frustration of remeshing. This also makes texturing, adding hair, and other details easier.
  • Trust the process: Sculpting can be a slow process, and the result may not look great initially. Trust yourself and invest the necessary time to refine and polish your work.
  • Invest in quality resources: Adding detail can be challenging, so invest in good brushes, textures, and materials. You don’t have to create everything from scratch – utilize available resources to improve your workflow. In addition to these lessons, I also want to emphasize the importance of patience and perseverance. Sculpting can be a challenging process, but with dedication and a willingness to learn from mistakes, you can achieve impressive results.

I hope that sharing my experience and the lessons I’ve learned will inspire and help others in their own Blender journey. Keep pushing your boundaries, and don’t be afraid to take on new challenges. Happy sculpting!

And finally here are some of the renders that came out of this process with some shameless self promotion :) Try and hover over the images to see the clay renders!

This is the final front view render of The Thinker, showcasing the overall form and attention to detail, such as the wrinkles around the eyes and the subtle expression. I went for a older man look. It always made me more interested since there are so much detail you can put on it.

Great ear shape. The good thing about ear is that everyone has different ones :) So you can pretty much get away with anything! With that being said there are some artifacts on the skin, which happened when I was trying to add more skin details. This is where I emphasize my earlier point “Invest in quality resources”! I will not do the same mistake again (hopefully).

Here comes the nose and the eyes. I added wrinkles as much as I can to give the old feeling. I am iffy about the skin texture, but other than that the nose turned out pretty good. Eyes on the other hand are not the best, I always had trouble tackling the eyes… Will get better with practice of course.

Happy blending!