Upcoming Courses and Workshops

 anatomy, courses, news
Feb 152024
 

Scot Eaton's Anatomy Courses, image of Houdon Ecorche and anatomy booksScott’s Eaton-Houdon écorché

SPRING SESSIONS

Enrollment is open for the Spring sessions of my anatomy and figure sculpting courses. These in-depth courses are designed to teach the skills every artist needs to produce inspiring, professional figurative work. The courses have been taught to artists and studios around the world, including Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, Disney Feature Animation, Sony, Warner Bros, Ubisoft, Blizzard, EA and many others. If you are looking for an intensive course to level up your figurative art skills, consider one of these:
Continue reading »

Anatomy for Sony Pictures Imageworks

 anatomy, courses, news
Mar 102023
 

.
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 Framestore @ Somerset House

 anatomy, courses
Nov 022018
 

Scott Eaton's Essential Anatomy Masterclass, with Framestore artistsIntro 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 class ecorche studies - Scott Eaton's Essential Anatomyin-course anatomy studies over old master drawings
Continue reading »

Comparative Anatomy at Blizzard & Pixar

 anatomy, animal anatomy, courses
Jan 032018
 

Pixar Animation Studios front entrance gate

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.

blizzard dedicated to entertainment plaque.

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.

Scott Eaton running comparative anatomy workshop at PixarWith the giant Luxo Jr sculpture outside Pixar’s lobby

contrast in styles - orcs versus cartoonsOrc v. the Incredibles, a battle of campus art

Facial Anatomy & Portrait Sculpting Workshop – Blizzard Entertainment

 anatomy, courses
Dec 092016
 

Demo sculpts from my Facial Anatomy workshop at Blizzard and UnbisoftThe growing collection of demo sculpts

I’m recently back to London after a long trip to the West Coast (LA, San Francisco). The first stop was Blizzard Entertainment for a four-day facial anatomy workshop. For the uninitiated Blizzard is the juggernaut game developer behind the hit franchises World of Warcraft (WoW), Overwatch, and Starcraft. From their fortress-like campus 100 miles south of LA in Irvine, CA, they run a digital empire built on monsters, magic, and well… fun.

Sculpture in the Blizzard Atrium dark magic at work here, me thinks a levitation spell or something

My job was to level up the artists’ facial anatomy and portrait sculpting skills. The workshop broke down into two days of facial anatomy lecture and two days of portrait sculpting in ZBrush. The content will sound familiar to anyone who actually reads the posts on this website (and doesn’t just looking at the pictures, like most), because I ran a similar workshop for Ubisoft very recently. In fact, you’ll recognize one of the heads rendered above. I added a second head (my Blizzard demo sculpt) to the menagerie this time.

Sculpting facial expressions in ZBrush during Scott Eaton's Facial Anatomy workshop sculpting expressions

Even though we were studying facial anatomy the artists also got a chance to draw and study from the Bodies in Motion site. We drew from quite a few Motions, less for full-body poses but more for examples of skull structure and head/neck articulation and anatomy in dynamic poses. There were some great drawings from the room full of talented artists.

Drawing from Bodies in Motion, head and neck studieshead studies from Bodies in Motion

Continue reading »

Facial Anatomy at Creative Assembly

 anatomy, courses
Sep 062016
 

ca-tm-default-image–

I recently finished a series of three facial anatomy workshops for the artists at Creative Assembly, the award winning, Sega-owned studio responsible for the long-running Total War franchise as well as titles like Alien Isolation and Halo Wars 2. Like most artists designing characters for games and visual effects the bar for creating realistic faces is exceptionally high and a functional understanding of the construction of the face is very important to achieving believably with the form and motion of the face. The goal of the workshops was to help the Creative Assembly artists develop a fluency with the anatomical forms and structures of the face so that they can work more quickly, accurately, and creatively, while avoiding the common mistakes many artists make in their portraiture.

Artists busy at work reconstructing faces - Scott Eaton's Facial Anatomy course.

Continue reading »

Digital Figure Sculpture course online – June 27, 2014

 courses, news, zbrush
May 022013
 

zbrush sculpture of Prometheus

The Winter session of Digital Figure Sculpture starts on June 27th. This course covers the critical foundation necessary to build naturalistic figures in ZBrush, including all the tools and techniques that I use day-to-day in my own figure sculpting – both on my art projects and on feature film characters.

Over ten weeks artists get a chance to hone their skills by completing numerous weekly figure studies and one detailed full-figure study. The course reinforces the importance of anatomy as the critical foundation for building realistic figures and shows practical construction techniques for applying this knowledge to figure sculpture. The goal is for every artist on the course to increase the realism and naturalism of their figurative work in ZBrush.

For more information and registration see the Digital Figure Sculpture course page here.

Anatomy at Rocksteady Studios

 anatomy, courses, news
Dec 192011
 



I am just back from a fantastic week of anatomy workshops with the character team at Rocksteady Studios, the creators of the wildly successful Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Batman: Arkham City games. Over five days we covered a lot of territory, going deep into human anatomy and portraiture, including some inside secrets on facial anatomy. While I was there, the Joker took home the “Character of the Year” award at the VGAs! Congratulations to the team at Rocksteady. I think there are a lot of people looking forward to what you do next (no pressure)!