I do love drawing portraits with ballpoint pens.
I’ve been meaning to draw Ryo’s wonderful face for ages and I finally got around to it.
A quickish ballpoint pen portrait of Tony from the Museum by Sktchy app.
I really struggled with this portrait of Molly from the Museum by Sktchy app. I couldn’t get the hair to work and made a bit of a mess of it. Still, it’s all learning!
I’ve been hatching this portrait of Apo slowly while dealing with a migraine. I have chronic migraine and have headaches which last for several days, and hatching with a ballpoint is the only drawing that is manageable. So glad that this is still possible though.
I recommend ballpoint pen drawing to anyone who wants something meditative and creative to do – once you’ve drawn the outline all you need to do is hatch!
I had a lot of fun adding the reflected greens and yellows to this portrait of Brittany. I experimented with adding Irotijen coloured pencils over the Bic hatching to soften it a little and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
This is Marcus from the Museum by Sktchy app drawn with Bic 4 colour ballpoint pens.
We drew Wendy, one of my favourite Sktchy muses, with ballpoint pens in my Spark Drawing Faces class yesterday .
I started drawing portraits with ballpoint pens in 2020 and I’ve drawn one every few weeks since then. Today I finished my first sketchbook of these drawings almost exactly three years after I started it with this portrait of Jodi from the Museum by Sktchy app. It’s a wonderful sketchbook because I can see how much progress I’ve made over these three years I developing both my skills and my style.
If you’d like to see a flip through of my completed sketchbook you can view it on YouTube here.
I bought some new 4 colour ballpoint pens by Life & Pieces; one is the usual blue/red/black/green but the other two have different colours to my usual Bics. I used all three for this portrait of Jeff from the Museum by Ktchy app.
They’re a bit blobby as you can probably tell – far more blobs of ink on this drawing than the Bics ever give me. They’re also more like gel pens, it’s not easy to work light strokes with them. But it was still fun to switch it up & use something different and I love the overall colour effect I got from them.
drawing faces 