Winter Term – Courses and Workshops

Nov 092025

WINTER SESSIONS

Registration is now available for full-enrollment sessions for the Winter term starting on January 25. These in-depth courses are designed to teach the skills every artist needs to produce inspiring, professional figurative work. They have been taught to artists and studios around the world, including Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, Epic Games, Disney Feature Animation, Sony Imageworks, Ubisoft, Blizzard, EA and many others.

If you are looking for an intensive course to develop your figurative art skills, consider one of these:

COURSES

ANATOMY FOR ARTISTS
The most comprehensive online course covering artistic anatomy. No prerequisites are necessary, just a sincere interest in learning about the wonderful machine that is the human body! more…

DIGITAL FIGURE SCULPTURE
An intense ten-week course in the tools and techniques of digital figure sculpture. This course is recommended for students with a firm grounding in anatomy (the Anatomy for Artists course is recommended) as well as an intermediate knowledge of ZBrush. more…

PORTRAITURE & FACIAL ANATOMY
The companion course to Anatomy for Artists, this course explore the anatomy of the face in-depth. It covers the construction of the skull, features, facial fat, musculature, expressions, and the Facial Action Coding system (FACS). Every great figure needs a great face, this course teaches you the anatomy you need to build it. more…

Epic Games Masterclass

anatomy, courses, news

Sep 232025

Scott with a crisp, wall-mounted Epic Games logo.

I am recently back to London from Cary, North Carolina, where I ran a two-day anatomy masterclass for the concept artists and character artists at Epic Games. This team is responsible for ALL the character designs in Fortnite – Epic Games’ main, enduring title (as well as a few others). We had about fifty concept artists (2D) on-site at Epic HQ, and the character artists (3D) joined remotely by Zoom.

Clearly it’s not possible to cover the anatomy of the entire body in two days, so extreme editing was required. We did manage a deep dive into what I consider the essential anatomical principles for artists and we ended each day with drawing sessions using reference from BodiesinMotion.photo’s Quickdraw feature (a couple of my efforts can be found here). I love having concept artists on my workshops since they like to draw as much as I do and are generally happy to grind away on drawing practice.

It was a whirlwind trip to be sure (especially travelling transatlantic), but as a longtime Fortnite player (since COVID, anyways), it was fun to visit HQ and meet the very talented, hardworking artists responsible for most of the pixels I’ve seen in-game over the years!

Prepping the setup…

And a few more images (if you play Fortnite, you’ll recognise a couple of these):
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Essential Anatomy for Insomniac Games

anatomy

Jul 082025

I recently delivered an anatomy masterclass for the amazing team at Insomniac Games. For those who don’t know, they are the Sony studio responsible for the Rachet & Clank series, and of course Spiderman 1, 2, and Miles Morales. With the Spiderman series, they have been pushing the boundaries of dynamic anatomy, poses, and animation for game characters. I’ve long admired their character work so it was a pleasure spending time with the team going deep into anatomy. Excited for their next game!

Marvel / Insomniac Games

Anatomy for Sony Pictures Imageworks

anatomy, courses, news

Mar 102023

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Whew, just finished eight weeks of anatomy lectures for Sony Pictures Imageworks, the studio behind my favorite animated film of all time – Spiderman Into the Spiderverse.
Over thirteen lectures we covered the essential anatomy of the human figure from head to toe (artistic anatomy mind you, not medical anatomy, so no guts etc.). It was an intensive combination of my two, longer, online anatomy courses – Anatomy for Artists and Portraiture & Facial Anatomy, delivered remotely packaged as two lectures per week. I’ve been weary of delivering workshops over Zoom versus in-person, but the convenience for the studio, with respect to timing and geography, is definitely hard to beat. If you’re a studio interested in similar workshops, feel free to get in touch.

Bandai Namco – Facial Anatomy workshop

anatomy, courses

Dec 052022

Bandai Namco

I recently completed an intensive facial anatomy workshop for the wonderful character artists at Bandai Namco. If you don’t know Bandai Namco, their game development DNA goes all the way back to the original Pac-Man, developed by Namco and released to the arcade in 1980 (!). Clearly Pac-man doesn’t require much facial anatomy expertise, but if we fast forward to the work the studio does today, it features character-heavy titles from the Tekken and Soul Caliber franchises, amongst many others. Over five days we covered the fundamentals of facial anatomy and the artists spend their evenings grinding away on sculpting exercises (in Zbrush) with reference from the BodiesinMotion.photo expression library. If you’re interested in a similar workshop, feel free to get in touch

Essential Anatomy with Industrial Light & Magic

anatomy, news

Mar 092022

I recently hosted artists from Industrial Light & Magic’s London and Singapore studios for a three-day Essential Anatomy workshop online. The goal was to go in-depth into a few challenging areas of the body needing special attention for their upcoming projects – facial anatomy and expressions, shoulders and neck, and forearms & hands.
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Facial Anatomy at Respawn Entertainment

anatomy, news

Feb 162020

Respawn reception on Valentine’s day

I’ve recently returned to soggy London from ever-sunny (but windy) Los Angeles where I ran an intensive facial anatomy course for the artists at Respawn Entertainment (an EA studio). For those who don’t know their work, their freshman release was an epic mech game called Titanfall, followed by its sequel. Then in 2019 they release two huge titles – the run-away hit Apex Legends, a Fortnight styled battle royale game, and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, an, umm, Star Wars game.
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Essential Anatomy at SUPERCELL

anatomy, news

Sep 252019

I’ve recently returned from a fun couple of days running an Essential Anatomy masterclass for the talented artists at SUPERCELL in beautiful Helsinki, Finland. Readers might know SUPERCELL as the genius developers behind hit mobile games Clash of the Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, and Brawl Stars. They have a reputation for expressive, cartoony character designs, so why the big interest in anatomy? Well, every figurative artists, even cartoonists, needs to drill down into the fundamentals of anatomy in order to build a foundation solid enough that they can stylise and abstract the human figure in a compelling, ‘believable’ way. Continue reading »

Essential Anatomy with Framestore @ Somerset House

anatomy, courses

Nov 022018

Intro showing some of the studios I’ve taught over the years

I’ve just finished an intensive, one-day Essential Anatomy session with the talented artists from Framestore, London. Sixty artists and I convened in the Somerset House screening room for a day covering critical lessons from both human and comparative anatomy. I don’t often run anatomy courses this short (most are a minimum of two days), so it was a challenge to distill the essential lessons from many years of teaching anatomy into a format the could deliver the maximum amount of useful information in a single day course.

in-course anatomy studies over old master drawings
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Anatomy reconstruction study – Homo naledi

anatomy, portrait sculpting, zbrush

May 242018

Homo naledi reconstruction, v2

A producer friend recently asked if I had time to put together a quick sculpt for a pitch he was giving to a potential client. The request was for a concept of what the extinct homonid species Homo naledi would have looked like in life. I happened to have a relatively free day and was excited to do some digital sculpting so I said I would give it a try.

First, who or what were Homo naledi? It turn out they are fairly recent relatives of modern humans (ca. 250,000 year ago) – discovered in 2013, to great acclaim, by a pair of cavers fumbling around in a South African cave system. The species appears to be a interesting mix of human and primate characteristics – hands and feet very near our own but with shoulders and pelvises closer to our primate ancestors. We know they were short of stature, possibly standing barely five feet tall, and had small skulls exhibiting primitive features including reduced cranial capacity (half of a modern human), robust orbital tori, reduced/absent chin, but with small teeth and gentle canines.

Taking these few data points and a handful of images of the incomplete skulls of homo Naledi, I put together a couple versions. The first, below, pushes the facial characteristics more towards primate, but with the spark of intelligence one would expect of the genus Homo. The second, and my preferred version (above), leans toward a more human interpretation of facial characteristics. It includes a quick torso study for context and posture, as well as what I imagine to be a mass of matted, dirty hair. A timelapse of the sculpting process coming soon.

Homo Naledi portrait study, v1

Comparative Anatomy at Blizzard & Pixar

anatomy, animal anatomy, courses

Jan 032018

I’ve recently returned to London after a busy couple weeks on the West Coast – this trip taking me back to Blizzard Entertainment and Pixar for anatomy talks and workshops. I’ve been to both studios a number of times in recent years, but this visit was for something new – the inaugural sessions of my Comparative Anatomy for Artists course.

What is comparative anatomy? Simply, it is the study of animal anatomy. More accurately though, it is the study of the relationships between the homologous anatomical structures of different animal species. For example, how a horse’s humerus (upper arm bone) differs from a human’s, and how that differs from a mole rat’s, or elephant’s, or dolphin’s in structure, function, and appearance (unbelievably yes, a dolphin has a humerus, as well as forearm, hand, and finger bones, all hidden in its front flipper!). There is a treasure trove of fascinating and bewildering adaptations that have taken place in the natural world to fit the general “animal vertebrate body plan” to many different environments and ecosystems. This course explores these amazing adaptations and how we apply this knowledge artistically to create, imagine, sculpt, draw, and animate better animals and creatures.

My Comparative Anatomy for Artist course will be running in London in the Spring of 2018, dates to be announced (sign up to the mailing list for news). If you are a games/visual effects/animation studio interested in an onsite workshop, please get in touch.

With the giant Luxo Jr sculpture outside Pixar’s lobby

Orc v. the Incredibles, a battle of campus art

Eaton-Houdon Écorché

anatomy, sculpture

Oct 032017

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The Eaton-Houdon Ecorche is a contemporary anatomy figure based on the classic L’Écorché, the 18th century anatomy study by French neoclassical sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. The original écorché figure was used for centuries in art academies and ateliers around the world to teach students anatomy and cast drawing.

This version, produced in collaboration with Michael Defeo, corrects a handful of lingering anatomical mistakes while retaining the gesture, pose, and naturalism that made the original a favorite of mine and of other artists through the centuries. Here it is produced at eighteen inches, an ideal size for desktop reference and study. Each figure is hand cast in museum-quality resin with removable magnetic arms.

Available at: EATON.london

currently out of stock, get in touch to be put on the waiting list

click for larger

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