Workshop - Italian Jousting Helm
Every now and then, a workshop pops up that feels too good to pass on! Recently, I joined a quick hard-surface sculpting workshop hosted by Abe Leal 3D on Twitch. It was fast, casual, and the perfect excuse to sharpen my sculpting skills.
The piece selected for the exercise was an Italian Jousting Helm currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art.You can actually download the reference online if you want to try the study yourself. The helm has a great mix of clean shapes and curvature that are valuable for any hard-surface artist to know.
Short workshops like these force you to focus on three essential skills: speed, observation, and form accuracy. There’s no room for overthinking, you either capture the silhouette and base structure or you spend the rest of the time fighting your own mistakes.
During the stream, I devoted about one hour to sculpting alongside the workshop, absorbing tips and watching Abe’s approach. After that, I took roughly two more hours on my own to complete the rest of the helm, applying what I had learned and refining the shapes. One of my biggest takeaways was the importance of protecting your clean primary forms. Hard-surface sculpting can quickly turn “clay-like and lumpy” if those initial clean curves get pushed or warped, and no amount of metal texture will fully hide bad structure.
To finish the study, I spent about 35 minutes giving the helm a quick pass in Substance Painter. I established a simple metallic base and layered dust, grunge, dirt, and color variation on top, breaking each element into masks and procedural details to avoid uniformity. A bit of controlled edge wear tied everything together into a presentable result seen on this post.
All in all, the exercise took around 3-4 hours, and it was absolutely worth it. Quick studies like these are great reminders that clean forms are the base on which a good hard-surface sculpt is built.
Stick around for more studies, experiments, and breakdowns!
— Arsenal Avery
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