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.
This is another portrait for my “Screen Queens” sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project 2021. It’s a portrait of O-Ren Ishii from the Kill Bill movie trilogy, played by Lucy Liu.
This is a portrait of Nob from Sktchy. The portrait was an experiment to see if the coloured pencil chiaroscuro method I learned last week would work with ballpoint pens. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
This is another page from my sketchbook for Brooklyn Art Library’s “The Sketchbook Project 2021”. I chose the theme “no erasing” because I wanted to use ballpoint pens throughout the sketchbook and the title of my book is “Screen Queens”. This queen is Amelie, played by Audrey Tautou.
Still working through this mini crisis of confidence, which is showing up in my lines at the moment I think. But I know that if I persevere sooner or later I’ll find my way through. In the meantime you can enjoy (or not) seeing how it shows up in my work 😂. This is Gen from Sktchy drawn in Bic ballpoint pen.
This is Johanna from Sktchy. She has an incredible face to draw, so full of interest and character and those glasses are a perfect framing device for portrait drawing. I always start my drawing with eyes unless the subject is wearing glasses, in which case I start with the glasses and work out from there.
I drew Johanna with a Unipin dark grey brush pen, painted her with Daniel Smith watercolour and finished up with Prismacolor coloured pencils, all in a Fabriano Venezia sketchbook.
This is Emma from Sktchy painted with Daniel Smith watercolours and finished with watercolour pencils. I haven’t quite got the angle right – in the inspiration photo her face is upturned and I haven’t quite captured that here which is why her eyes look too far up in her head. I think they’re positioned correctly but I haven’t got the tilt of the neck and chin right so it looks weird. I also totally lost her likeness but you wouldn’t know that if I didn’t tell you because you don’t know what she looks like, right?
My second portrait for my “Screen Queens” sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project 2021 is Zoë Washburne from the cult TV show Firefly and the movie Serenity, played by the very awesome Gina Torres. Firefly is definitely in my top 10 favourite TV shows ever and Zoë is a totally badass.
This is another portrait from the Sktchy portrait course “Drawing Anatomy with Tiffany”. This is Beata and the focus was meant to be on her ear, though I had the most fun with her nose and eye as usual. I used Copic markers and Prismacolor coloured pencils.
This has been a long slow draw over a few days but I got there in the end. It’s a portrait of Jeeb from Sktchy for the “mouth” class of my Sktchy portrait anatomy class. I decided to use ballpoint pen for the portrait because I find mouths so hard to draw with ballpoints. Mouths are definitely my Achilles heel anyway ; they are unquestionably the facial feature I find the hardest to get right and I really struggle to get that roundness with ballpoint pens. Anyway I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out and I managed to draw teeth and they look OK!
drawing faces 