Iwan Harmaen is an Indonesian pencil artist from Tasikmalaya, West Java, who creates photorealistic portraits using only pencil, rendering lifelike facial expressions on paper. Entirely self-taught, he first became interested in drawing in elementary school by copying Dragon Ball characters and later found his own style in realism through Facebook art communities and YouTube tutorials.
As a student in Bandung in 2010, wanting to support himself without relying on his parents, he began offering drawings to friends for voluntary payment. He went on to sell caricatures on the street, and by 2013 felt ready to offer realist pencil and watercolor portraits to the wider public through his blog and Instagram. He has said his greatest challenge as a self-taught artist was having to find his own working methods through repeated trial and error rather than being taught them directly.
A pencil portrait he made of West Java governor Ridwan Kamil and posted to Instagram drew the governor's attention, who offered in the comments to buy it. Iwan declined the sale and asked to meet him in person instead, and the two later met, talked and were photographed together.In 2024 he created We Are Still Here, card #251 in The Memes collection, minted with an edition size of 310. In the piece's accompanying statement, he reflected on the difficulty of the market at the time, writing: “Not selling work for months, constantly watching big artists sell work for hundreds of ETH, seeing a lot of airdrops that we didn't even get. We're still here.”
