My first trimester at the FAA

When I first started at the sculpture program, there were a lot of new things for me. Coming from a life of sitting down in front of a computer to standing up for 8 hours a day getting your hands messy, is quite a big difference. But apart from actually using clay when modelling I also got thrown into trying to learn how to draw in sight-size. It might sound very logical, but when I first tried it, it felt more like drawing star signs with "connect the dots" sort of mentality. Measure a hight, put a little indication dot, measure another hight and a width, put a dot.....and link up.

After getting used to it though, it's not actually like "connect the dots" and you can draw pretty freely and just "check yourself" with all these mirrors and plumb lines and all other methods that they teach you to use here.

A normal week day here at the sculpture program would be 3h sculpting in the morning, 1h break for lunch, 3h drawing in the afternoon and then either 2h anatomy lecture (once a week), 2h evening drawing (twice a week) or about an hour of art history lecture (once a week).

In my first trimester we did a lot of short sculpture projects. We started with sculpting a pepper for a couple of days, introducing us to seeing abstract shapes. Then we made a copy of a cow femur 1.5 times the size in plaster, to get used to the material that we later on would use to cast most of our sculptures. After this we started copying four plaster casts of features from Michelangelo's David. We did the mouth, the nose, the ear and the eye. When we finished the features we copied a human skull. This introduced us to how to set up and sculpt a portrait, but with the benefit of it being completely still. Our final sculpture project of the trimester was then a life size portrait of a live model.