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Course curriculum

    1. Student Orientation Video

    2. Join your community!

    3. Materials

    4. Vocabulary

    1. Key Planes and Bony Landmarks

    1. The Anatomy of the Skull

    1. Creating an Underpainting from a Live Model

About this course

  • $79.99
  • 7 lessons
  • 2 hours of video content

Great Value

Learn a lifelong skill for the price of a trip to the art supply store

Course Overview

Manu Saluja teaches you how to paint with x-ray vision. Anatomy and Facial Structure is the foundation of a great portrait. Manu will break down all the bones of the skull, how they interact with light, and how they can become your cheat codes for a flawless portrait. Then, she’ll show you how to combine those structural landmarks into planes to bring your piece into three dimensions. From there, she’ll dive into painting a full portrait with a live model, showing you how this structural grasp of facial anatomy translates into a vivid portrait.

  • Learn the bones of the skull

  • How light interacts with the planes of the head

  • Identify structural landmarks as visual shorthand

  • Understand how structures relate to features

  • Build a skull in three dimensions

  • Learn the relationships that create proportion

Instructor

Manu Saluja

Instructor

Manu Saluja received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art, and her BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts where she was mentored by John Frederick Murray. Saluja’s work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery (London), the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art (Wisconsin), and the Butler Institute of American Art (Ohio). Winner of the 2019 BP Portrait Travel Award, her resulting paintings were exhibited at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland in 2020. Saluja has paintings in public and private collections throughout the U.S., Canada, U.K., and India. In 2023 she was unanimously selected by Mechanics Hall in Worcester, MA to paint a life-size portrait of Sojourner Truth now permanently on view in the Grand Portrait Gallery. She has exhibited her work with numerous galleries including 33 Contemporary, James Baird, Sugarlift, Abend and Dacia, and has been featured in publications such as Huffington Post, Fast Company Design, American Art Collector, Realism Today, Fine Art Connoisseur, News India Times, and Artists & Illustrators. Saluja has taught drawing and painting for over 15 years with courses at NYAA, Montclair State University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the Long Island Academy of Fine Art. Born in Brooklyn in 1971, and a longtime resident of Queens, Saluja currently lives and works in Long Island, NY.

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