This is Goldipants from Sktchy and she has such a fabulous face to draw. Sometimes I make the wrong choice of medium for a portrait but this time I think I made the perfect choice – I love how this portrait turned out with ballpoint pens. I don’t think I could have done a better job with any other medium.
I’m getting close to finishing my little sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project now. Today’s screen queen portrait is of SeoBi (played by the amazing Bae Doo-na) from the Korean zombie series Kingdom. Of course I’m including her because she’s awesome but also in the hope that those of you who aren’t familiar with Korean film and TV will go check it out. My daughter got me totally hooked on it and if it’s got Bae Doo-na in it it’s probably worth watching (she appeared Korean director and Oscar winner Bong Joon-Ho’s debut film The Host).
Ballpoint pen sketching is by far the most meditative for me – I think it’s the repetitive hatching in one direction that makes it feel so relaxing. And I have another big week on my hospital neuromodulation course this week so I needed a calming day today so I decided to use ballpoint pens for this portrait of Juan from Sktchy.
Álfrún was one of my first Sktchy draws and every so often I return to her gallery to find another photo to draw. She has a wonderful collection of inspiration photos to choose from and such a beautiful face to draw. Capturing such fair skintones and light hair effectively is also a challenging exercise for me to return to. I used Lisa Bardot’s new upadted Pencil Box brush collection for Procreate to draw this portrait on my iPad Pro.
May the Fourth be with you! Happy Star Wars Day 2021.
Today I’ve been working on another page in my little sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project 2021. My Screen Queen for today is Villanelle from the wonderful BBC drama “Killing Eve“, played by Jodie Comer. I’m beginning to realise that most of my Screen Queens are kick ass women with assertively violent streaks. Not sure what that says about me 🙂
This is Raman from Sktchy. I drew him in my Life Noble Note Plain sketchbook with Bic 4 colour ballpoint pens.
This is Rhayane from Sktchy. I’ve been looking for a Procreate brush that I could combine with the ballpointy brush to cover large areas and I finally found one! The striped effect is created using a Texturetown brush and I love the effect it creates!
This is another page in my Screen Queens sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project. It’s a portrait of Andréa Martel from the French drama Call My Agent, played by Camille Cottin, who is unquestionably my lockdown screen queen.
This is Megan from Sktchy drawn with a couple of Bic 4 colour ballpoint pens. I love how these 4 colour pens force me to work with a limited palette but I realised after I’d drawn this how lazy I’ve become with some of my lines. I’m happy enough with the face here but the hair is very lazy – I didn’t bother to define it in the early stages of the drawing and so it just became a mass of colour below the ear. I’m going to try to take more care with my drawing in future and work on improving this.
drawing faces 