Characters. Creatures. Clothing.
A 1:1 Production Sculpting Mentorship
10 sessions · 2 hours each · $2,000 USD With Aleksandr Kirilenko
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What This Is
This mentorship is built on two things, and they're really the same skill at two different scales.
The first is form. Sculpting is where I'm at my strongest after fifteen-plus years of production — real-time games at Ninja Theory (Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Bleeding Edge), cinematic work at Blur Studio (Netflix's Love, Death + Robots) and Platige Image (The Witcher 3, Total War: Warhammer cinematics), collectibles at Prime 1 Studio, digital fashion for Ralph & Russo's first digital haute couture collection. Form creation — understanding what a form actually is, why it reads the way it does, and how to reach it efficiently — is the skill underneath all of that work. Most sculpting problems aren't detail problems; they're seeing problems. What I teach, above everything else, is a way of seeing form and more efficient approaches to solving it: the difference between fixing a sculpt in twenty minutes and pushing "clay" around for two days without knowing what's wrong.
Fair warning: the way I teach form and anatomy is almost completely different from the traditional approaches you'll find in schools and most courses. It isn't built for academic completeness — it's built for the most efficient execution in production, the way the work actually gets done and judged inside studios. If you've studied anatomy the conventional way and it still isn't translating into your sculpts, this is likely why.
The second is the same eye applied to the whole piece. A character isn't a collection of well-made parts — it's a silhouette, a posture, a consistency between the forms and everything sitting on top of them, textures included. Seeing whether a complete character holds together, and knowing exactly which element is breaking it, is how an art director reads work — and it's a skill I've built across every pipeline I've shipped in. You won't spend ten sessions polishing one arm. You'll build a full character, with the depth going into the sculpt and my direction covering everything the sculpt has to live with.
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The Sculpting Core
Three areas, all carrying equal weight — these are what people consistently come to me for:
Bodies. Anatomy as living structure, not memorized muscle maps — proportion, gesture, weight, and the landmarks that make a figure read as alive rather than assembled.
Creatures. Real anatomical logic applied to invented forms, so a creature feels biologically plausible and designed with intent, not stitched together from reference.
Clothing. Fabric behavior learned by observation, not just simulation — why a fold forms, where tension lives in a garment, how cloth describes the body underneath it. I've published dedicated tutorials on both figure and clothing sculpting; this is studied ground, not a side topic.
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The Full-Character Layer
Alongside the sculpting depth, I direct your complete piece the way a lead would in production: silhouette and read, posture and gesture, proportion at the character scale, and whether the surfacing and presentation stay consistent with the forms underneath. I'm not going to teach you hair cards or shader graphs — that's not what this program is for — but nothing in your character gets to drift off-model or undermine the sculpt while I'm looking at it. You finish with a whole character that holds together, not a beautiful fragment.
Part of that direction includes market awareness. Having shipped work for both Western and Asian productions, I know how differently the two markets read a character — what a Japanese studio's hiring bar rewards versus a Western one, and how current trends shift what a portfolio needs to show. If you're aiming at a specific market, your piece gets shaped with that target in mind, not generic "good portfolio" advice.
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How It Works
Free 30-minute intro call before any commitment — this is for you, not a screening step on my end. A chance to see whether the way I teach actually clicks before you pay for anything.
Excerpts from past mentorship sessions and my tutorials are free on my channel — watch them before booking the intro call, so the call itself can go straight to your work: https://www.youtube.com/@aleksandr_korln/videos
8 two-hour live 1:1 sessions, scheduled around your pace — long enough to sculpt together and review properly, not just talk
Direct, unfiltered critique — no vague encouragement, no filler
This is a working program, not a lecture series. Every session ends with clear direction; you work between sessions and we review your progress in the next one — the same feedback loop you'd have with a lead in production.
Built around your piece and your goals: portfolio work, a personal project, or a character aimed at a specific studio's bar
Investment: $2,000 USD for the full program
Payment options: pay in full, or split into two payments of $1,000
Student discount: 20% off ($1,600) for current students and recent graduates in a 3D-related field — proof of enrollment or degree required
On completion: every student who finishes the full program receives a personal referral letter from me. Given fifteen-plus years across Ninja Theory, Blur Studio, Platige Image, and Prime 1 Studio, that's a signed reference from someone whose name studios recognize — attached to your application, not just your portfolio.
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This is the last mentorship program I'm offering. Fifteen-plus years of production sculpting across games, film, collectibles, and digital fashion — distilled into the skill I care about most, applied to the whole of your work.
For any questions please contact me directly: aleksandr@korln.com