Light & Form

About Light & Form

Free 3D sculptures for learning to draw light and form.

Drawing a figure convincingly comes down to one thing: seeing how light turns across a form. Light & Form gives you sculptures to study that with. Pick one, turn it to any angle, put the lamp wherever you like, and draw what you see.

Why sculpture

For centuries, art academies taught drawing in cast rooms, halls of plaster copies of famous sculpture. Before students drew a live model, they drew casts. A cast holds still for as long as you need, and its single pale color hides nothing: no skin tones, no patterns, no glare, just form and the light on it. You can see clearly where the light side ends, where the form shadow begins, how cast shadows fall, and how reflected light lifts the dark side.

Here the casts are 3D scans of real sculptures, and the light is yours to move. One sculpture can give you a hundred different studies.

Ways to practice

Using the viewer

The light stays fixed to the model as you turn it, just like a lamp in a studio.

The Asaro head

The Asaro head is a human head reduced to flat, angled planes. On a plane head each surface faces one way, so it takes a single value. That shows you plainly where the light turns, where the form shadow starts, and where shadows fall under the brow, nose and lip. Once you know the planes, you start to see them in every face.

John Asaro, an American painter born in 1937, developed the Planes of the Head while teaching figurative painting at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The physical head has been available since 1976. The one here is “Asaro Head” by AgentSCAD, a fan recreation shared under CC BY-SA. It is not the official sculpture, which you can buy from planesofthehead.com.

Where the models come from

The sculptures are scans made in museums, from three sources: Three D Scans, an archive started by Oliver Laric that publishes its scans free of copyright restrictions; Scan the World on MyMiniFactory; and SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, which has released its plaster casts into the public domain. Each scan was converted for the web and given one plain marble finish. Scans shared under CC BY-NC-SA keep that license here.

All models