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Oglu is right as usual.
What you need to do is actually put down the wacom pen and pick up a few really good anatomy books and even some instructional videos from traditional artists such as Glenn Vilpu.
Sculpting is a form of communication. You’re communicating an idea, or form. Like other forms of communication, if you do not understand what you’re trying to say, you simply cant express it properly.
You need an understanding of the human skull, its shape, the the way muscles connect to it, and the shapes that muscle and fat add to the face, as well as how the eyes sit in the skull, the way skin folds and conforms to the underlying structures etc.
Glen Vilpu says it the best, which is the goal of the artist is to communicate the “total”. Meaning you need to understand the sum of everything that makes up what you’re trying to recreate. For example, if you’ve only ever seen a building from the outside, how could you ever build a copy of that building? The outside of the building only exists because of its internal structure.
Once you have an understanding of the forms, the skeleton, and how muscles and the body work form the inside to outside… you can pretty much communicate any anatomical structure because you will know what you’re trying to communicate to the viewer.
Its just like speech, if I asked you to describe how an atomic particle works, you would have to know how they work before you could explain it to me. You might even draw me a diagram on paper to further clarify what you’re saying. The information can be communicated in various ways, but first you must understand what you’re communicating. This applies to sculpting because sculpting is communication. You must understand what you’re trying to sculpt, then worry about sculpting it.
I think you will find that the easiest part is sculpting and the hardest part is fully understanding what you’re sculpting. As you can see its pretty easy to sculpt in mudbox, the problem is you lack an understanding of what you’re trying to communicate.
I have no doubt that you can sculpt a female human head or any other anatomical structure once you’ve fully understand human anatomy. We take for granted that we see faces every day, and we think we can just sculpt them. It isnt that easy. We must understand what we see, before we can recreate it.
This is the long journey of a character artist.
-Adam
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