Zoe Dufour is a master sculptor with incredible skill for modeling form. In this Masterpiece Demo you’ll get to visit her studio and watch as she creates a longer sculpture from scratch. She’ll show you everything you’ll need to get started, including how she makes her own tools. She’ll guide you through the entire process of sculpting a portrait from life, starting with the wire armature, then building up clay to get the large forms, and taking it to a finish with the details. After the clay sculpt is finished you’ll see how she makes a throwaway plaster mold and a cast with a base. It’s fully narrated, as she explains her thought process, gives tips and warns about common mistakes.

There’s two versions. The first is a refined edit of the process. We’ve cut down days of footage to deliver as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time. The second is a real time version of the whole process. The only thing we cut out were breaks and long pauses so that you can learn from the raw experience. If there’s any portion of the sculpture that you want to see in detail as it really happened, it’s in here.

About Zoe Dufour

Zoe Dufour has been studying and teaching at the Grand Central Atelier in New York for over a decade. As an artist, she explores the beauty and design of nature through the study of the human form. While sculpting, she looks at her subjects in an entirely different light than in her day-to-day interactions. The typical social judgments all drop away and are replaced by a desire to understand the subject in an abstract way, as a series of form and volume relationships. She is inspired by this push to set aside preconceptions in order to see more accurately. This accuracy is a form of beauty in itself.