You may have a modern eye, or want to design pieces like the old masters. Sculptors might specialize in the design of one specific kind of sculpture, such as freestanding sculpture or relief.
You may need to know how to weld metals and assemble and cut more pliant materials.
You may operate hand tools, chisels, pliers, or scissors.
But, as sculptors function as both the designer and craftsman, you will be carving or chiseling and modeling pieces with your hands, you will also need manual dexterity. It goes without saying that the main requirement for being a sculptor is artistic ability. A sculptor can sculpt, chisel, carve, and cast with a variety of mediums, or choose to specialize in just one. The sculptures artists create can be large, like the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln enshrined forever within the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, or they can be small, like Jonty Hurwitz’s tiny human sculpture that is so tiny it cannot be seen by the naked eye. The term three-dimensional refers to the three dimensions of space – depth, breadth, and length, and is distinguished from other art, such as drawing and painting, which are two-dimensional.
Sculptors are highly-creative fine artists who create three-dimensional art in a wide variety of mediums. Many sculptors, while carving out their own niche, have found new ways to use everyday materials, such as Pablo Picasso who used bicycle parts in his famous sculpture entitled, “Bull’s Head”, or Nathan Sawaya, who builds larger-than-life sculptures out of Legos exhibiting them in museums around the world. Precious materials like gold, jade, and silver are typically used to craft expensive, often smaller sculpture, while more common and less expensive materials, such as hardwoods, ceramics, and wax are used for wider purposes. Users pull, pinch, push, and twist “virtual clay” to create a sculpture. 3D modeling, and more specifically, digital sculpting, is a new form of sculpture where users interact with a digital model, much like when modeling clay. Today, contemporary artists work with a number of non-traditional forms of sculpture, including light, sound, ice, and kinetic sculpture, as well as 3-D modeling. This art form has been around for thousands of years but is just as relevant today in the form of digital sculpting as are the pieces created in 230,000 BCE or earlier, like the Venus of Berekhat Ram (oldest known Stone Age sculpture). A branch of fine arts, sculpting is three-dimensional art made from molding, casting, welding, and carving a variety of mediums, including stone, metal, wood, clay, and other materials.