What are the Challenges in Working Only from a Photograph?
There is always a high expectation for realism when sculpting an individual who is alive and available for comparison. In such an instance, I like to meet my model before I begin the sculpture, due to the fact that photographs can be misleading. While I have sculpted many individuals working only from a photograph, it can become quite tricky turning a 2D image into a 3D sculpture, as the perspective changes dramatically in a photograph, and the size of facial features is difficult to determine. The perspective of the camera lens is also deceiving, as the face will become distorted when the photographer snapped the photo too closely to its subject. I once had a commissioner tell me that my model’s ears were too big, and she proceeded to cut the ear off of the life-size photocopy of my model’s face, and stick on my clay sculpture, announcing, “It’s supposed to look like that!” What many people fail to realize is that the ears in the photo are farther back than the nose, making them appea
