Brian Chan

*Design time*

A couple of weeks ago, I accidentally bumped my poor aloe plant, and it spilled out all over the floor. It made me realize how unstable that tapered terra cotta pot is. So a few days ago, I fired up and designed this wide, buttressed base dish to replace the old one.

*slaps aloe pot*

This baby can handle so many perturbations...

Swipe to see before/after. Very exciting.

Here's a portrait of from a 3-hour drawing session. I used to worry about drawing glasses right, but I've learned a few things. Glasses can help with drawing the face, since they are easier to draw than a whole face, and you can check the spatial relation of all the facial features. You can even draw the glasses first. Don't be afraid to draw all the weird shadows and reflections. It looks weird in the beginning, but it'll all come together. Trust the process.

Charcoal and white highlights on grey toned paper.

I'm proud to announce that I have a few more features in the 216th issue of the Origami Tanteidan magazine! This one has a lot of great pictures from the February convention and a small writeup by me. If you haven't already, I suggest subscribing to this publication. It always has the latest stuff on Origami developments, as well as diagrams and crease pattern challenges.

Sweipe to get a glimpse of my table from the convention!

A portrait of Dayna, from a 3-hour drawing session at the Boston Figurative Art Center. Charcoal and white highlights on grey toned paper.

This was a difficult angle to draw from (looking up; profile but not quite) but I'm glad that I challenged myself. It's my best portrait of Dayna so far, in my opinion. See my older posts for comparison (they're not bad)

A second portrait of Marquis for Shea's portrait drawing class at the Academy of Realist Art. I drew Marquis last week, so I changed the angle and focused harder on getting the shading values to look right. I think I improved. Scroll back a week to see the difference!

Charcoal and white highlights on grey toned paper.

Portrait of artist from the . Go have a look at his channel too!

Charcoal and white highlights on grey toned paper.

I have drawn figure portraits of Nate last year, swipe to see a small digital sketch.

3 hour portrait of (check out her paintingsss!) Done at the . I don’t have a lot of profile portraits, so this was a nice change. There are some things that are easier about drawing profiles, like there's no need to line up match two eyes. So, more focus can be applied to drawing the silhouette. Another challenge today was to shade the subtle, fully lit skintones without being too heavy-handed.

Charcoal and white highlights on grey toned paper.

I'm taking 's class in portrait drawing at the . Here is our first subject, , who is also an artist - check out his work!

In this class, I hope to develop a more reliable way of seeing and depicting the subtle light/medium/dark values of a portrait. With Shea's help!

Satoshi Kamiya's 4th book is out! I will definitely be getting this to add to my collection. His hornet opened my eyes to the level of complexity that could be achieved in an insect origami.

『神谷哲史折り紙作品集4』の店頭販売を開始しました。
https://www.origamihouse.jp/book/original/kamiya4/kamiya4.html

※一般の書店では販売しておりません。
※通販の予約注文は随時発送いたします。到着まで今しばらくお待ち下さい。

Keeping in the spirit of and east, which both happened recently, had a cosplay drawing night featuring in her completely scratch-made costume from

Here's a 40-minute sketch done in graphite and white charcoal on toned grey paper. Why did I use graphite? Cause I felt like it!

Portrait of from a figure drawing session at . I finished the figure drawing in 2 hours, so there were 40 minutes left to draw this portrait.

Charcoal and white highlights on grey toned paper.