I am happy to announce the first three-day portraiture workshop that I will be running from my London studio, 3-5 November, 2010. This course, open to the public, follows a very successful run of the same course at Disney’s Blackrock Studio in July. Over the three days we will explore the construction of the skull and features in detail and then students will to put this information to use completing their own forensic reconstruction of a face over a cast skull. For more information on the course and to register, visit the course page here.

Here is an early preview of a new digital sculpture that I am slowly working on. The sculpture is of Hephaestus, the smith god and Pandora (not shown, obviously). See more of the story here. Time permitting I will try to post some early sketches and other works in progress. Check back soon….

My long-running anatomy course is now online to share the lessons that have proved so valuable to me and many other professional artists over the years. The summer session is currently underway. The next session starts on September 24. For more details on the course and registration please visit the course page.

Over the weekend I shot the second installment of the Bodies in Motion Reference Library. This shoot had a huge variety of talent including: mixed martial arts, kung fu, karate, stage combat, Spanish fencing, female sumo wrestling, classical ballet, hand balancing, break dancing and contortion.

Tons of images to process (~700 Gb), but sequences are forthcoming. If you are interested in staying informed about the library’s development/availability, drop me a message here.

click for larger image

Samples from my Bodies in Motion image library are now online. The library was created to capture high-quality, dynamic figure reference for artists. The human figure is extremely complex and its form is so variable during motion that high-quality reference is essential for capturing that anatomical complexity. The full library is over 20,000 images so I can only put a sample of images online to start, but I hope you find it interesting and useful!

link to Bodies in Motion

Here is a little digital maquette that I knocked together a few months back to test some new functionality in Zbrush 3.5R3. Timelapse videos of the construction/sculpt will be available as resources in the Online Anatomy Course.

• Course Announcement on the NAD Centre website

The plates from Duchenne de Boulogne’s Le Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (ca 1876) have been added to the reference library. The images are curious and not entirely pleasant to look at, but useful for artists interested in the extremes of human facial expressions. Duchenne would use electro-stimulation to activate individual facial muscles in willing but not entirely happy subjects.
Link to image gallery.

I will be giving a lecture at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects as part of an Anatomy Masters evening on the 22nd of October. I will be one of four speakers presenting that evening and admission is free, so you will definitely get your money’s worth! The content is evolving but my talk will focus on comparative anatomy. More details to come….