I have always wanted to try my hand at sculpting. So I looked around and found this class offered at Gnomon School of Visual Effects.

Gnomon was founded by Alex Alvarez who, in 1997, was working as an Applications Engineer for Alias|Wavefront. Alex spent much of his time at the production studios working with digital artists. He began to see a need for a school that taught the tools necessary to produce digital effects and animation. So he researched all the available programs and found that all of them had short-comings: Their teachers didn’t have production experience or they offered only one-week classes or they had only introductory-level courses. Alex began to envision the perfect school. Thus the genesis of Gnomon was formed. We opened our doors in October of 1997 with one computer lab, three instructors, four digital classes and 50 students. By July of 1998 we offered a dozen classes, taught by 13 teachers to almost 100 students. Fast forward four years and the numbers have grown even more: almost 50 classes, over 35 teachers and more that 200 students. In 2001 we saw the need for a short, intensive training program geared towards teaching individuals with some 3D experience how to use Alias|Wavefront’s Maya. Thus we began to offer the Maya Fast Track Program. This nine-week course offers over 270 hours of training in nine areas of usage: Intro to Maya, Surface Modeling, Texture Mapping, Organic Modeling, Lighting and Rendering, Animation and Visual Effects, Character Kinematics, Character Skinning and Particles and Dynamics. Instructors for the Maya Fast Track also have extensive production experience.

The Gnomon Workshop live events exist for a simple purpose... to allow students and professionals from around the world to come together and share production experiences, techniques and artwork. Located at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, California, these weekends have been tremendously inspiring for all that attend. Pictured: Justin Sweet - he studied art at Cal State Fullerton and later worked for Black Isle studios. More recently he has been doing freelance work for various game and book publishers, as well as production companies and magazines. A noted fantasy artist, some of his clients include Disney, National Geographic, Wizards of the Coast, Tor, DelRey and Wandering Star. Justin's work has been featured in Spectrum, from which he received both a gold and silver medal. He lives in southern California with his wife and three children.

The Gnomon Workshop live

During the weekend seminar a girl sat next to me that I took a notice of. I thought her facial features and hair would make a cool character sculpture for my class I was about to take...

...so i asked if i could take her picture to help me with my design.

Then I was having trouble just drawing up the pose I wanted, so I took pictures of my friend Angelica as she made the pose.

I took references from the pictures of Veronica (face hair) and my friend Angelica's pose images. Added in other reference photos for muscle structure and I came up with this drawing.

The drawings are made to size, so when you are sculpting you can take measurements off the drawing

The Television Center. Where Gnomon is located.