About the Course

Filmed over two days, Michael paints the full arc of a traditional portrait: a live sitting with artist Jennifer Gennari, then completion from photo reference — covering materials, methodology, and techniques refined across more than 600 commissioned portraits.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN: Meeting your sitter, understanding your materials, drawing, painting from life and photograph, and finishing your work. WHO IT'S FOR: Aspiring and professional artists who want to learn portrait painting in the tradition of the Old Masters.

The portraitist of Presidents, Justices, and Senators — whose painting of Congressman John Lewis hangs in the Smithsonian — opens his National Arts Club studio for his first complete online course.

WHAT YOU GET

CBS

Sunday Morning Feature

Work in

Smithsonian Collection

Chairman, Portrait

Society of America

Subtitles in

Spanish, French, German, Portuguese & Korean

COMMUNITY & ACCESS

Drawing America

Your home for drawing & painting

Welcome! Post homework in the correct course thread. Live sessions, review feed, and scheduled posts are all in the left nav.

Live Sessions

Review Feed

Join Jennifer Gennari, Will Weston

About Your Instructor

Michael Shane Neal

Michael Shane Neal has completed more than 600 commissioned portraits displayed in institutions around the world — including the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, where his painting of Congressman John Lewis was acquired in 2020.

His sitters read like a roll call of American life: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, President George H.W. Bush, Majority Leaders Robert C. Byrd and Bill Frist, actors Morgan Freeman and Jimmy Fallon, and more than a dozen Federal Judges. He was a protégé of Everett Raymond Kinstler, and today paints from Kinstler's former studio inside the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park — a room previously occupied by Frank Vincent DuMond, who taught Georgia O'Keeffe and Norman Rockwell. Neal is only the third artist to occupy the space in more than a century.

He is chairman of the board of the Portrait Society of America and a recipient of its Grand Prize Award, along with the Lotos Award of Distinction for the Arts. For over thirty years he has taught workshops around the world — and for the first time, that training is coming to Drawing America.