Sculpting Widths

Sculpture is about width and depth. Humans, however, don’t understand depth the same way they understand width.

Imagine it this way: if you’re looking at a picture of an elephant from the front, you can see how wide their body is and comprehend that almost instantly. However, you can’t tell, to the same extent, the distance from their front legs to their back legs.

The trick? Rotate your model so that the depth becomes a width. Now it might seem like I’m playing a game with you, but let me explain. When I’m looking at a model from the front, I can see how wide the bulb of their nose is. That’s easy. I can see how wide their nose is from nostril to nostril.

However, it’s much harder to know the distance from the tip of their nose to the base of their nostril — unless I rotate the model so that I’m looking at a side view. Then suddenly I’m looking at a “width” again.