Brian Chan

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.

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.

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.

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.