This is the lovely Ayshin from Sktchy. I totally messed up the headscarf in the portrait so I had to change the colour from a creamy yellow to purple to disguise my disaster which works OK, but isn’t quite what I had planned. I wish I had left the scarf alone as a line drawing and hadn’t attempted to add colour to it at all. There’s a lesson there for me in putting a little more thought into when to stop drawing.
I drew Ayshin in my Life Noble Note Plain with Bic 4-way multicolour ballpoint pens.
I’ve been working on this portrait of Dennis from Sktchy very slowly for days, scratching away on my iPad Pro with the ballpointy brush. I’m finding building up layers of colour through slow hatching so very meditative.
There is always something very satisfying about drawing with that most humble of drawing materials, the Bic ballpoint pen. This is Henry from Sktchy, drawn in a Life Noble Note Plain notebook with Bic Cristal and Bic 4-way multicolour ballpoint pens.
This is Cosmic from Sktchy. The inspiration photo has fantastic intense colour but I ran out of steam long before I got anywhere near those intense blues and reds. Maybe I’ll come back to it another day and finish it off.
I drew this on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.
Over the last 6 months or so, since I took the Sktchy’s Portraits in Pen course, I have gradually fallen in love with ballpoint pen drawing. After a lot of experimentation I’ve found my own style and I find ballpoint pen drawing so beautifully meditative. It’s what I turn to when I’m feeling most stressed because I know it will calm me down and chill me out.
Today was quite full on so I picked up my Bics and drew the beautiful Stephanie from Sktchy in my Life Noble Note Plain.
I drew Anastasia from Sktchy with Bic ballpoint pens in a Life Noble Note Plain notebook. I have to say that drawing with ballpoints is definitely the most therapeutic kind of drawing I’m doing right now – hatching in one direction is just so meditative.
I’m finding making these hatched ballpoint pen drawings very therapeutic. It’s something about gradually building a face out of parallel lines, well not entirely parallel but the best that my painful hands can make! This is Kelmy from Sktchy and I drew him with Bic Cristal and Bic 4-way multicolour pens in a Life Noble Note Plain notebook.
I’ve abandoned the Emilio Braga notebook that I was using for my ballpoint pen drawings. After just five drawings it started to fall apart and there was no way it was going to cope with many more of these sketches. To be fair, it’s a notebook, not a sketchbook, and ballpoint pen drawing requires a lot of moving a lot of the page around and some layering of pen work so it does need a book that will take some rough treatment. The Emilio Braga notebook is a beautiful notebook, it’s just not made for this kind of work.
So for this portrait of Nadia from Sktchy I started a new sketchbook that I bought recently, a Life Noble Notebook with plain paper. This is another Japanese notebook that I saw in an online shop that was relatively inexpensive and irresistible to a Japanese paper addict like me. And the paper is beautiful for ballpoints! It’s a dream for drawing and would be great for writing or calligraphy too.
I used my usual Bic Cristal and Bic 4-way multicolour ballpoints for this portrait in a Life Noble Note Plain notebook.
I spent a lot of time on this portrait of Monika but eventually ran out of steam and really didn’t want to work on it any more. This is my problem with both ballpoint pen and coloured pencil drawings – they take a lot of work to finish well. Sometimes they look good at a half done stage but you really have judge well when to stop. I worked on this one too long, past that stage so it really needs a lot more work to look much more finished to look good again. But that is a useful lesson for me in itself.
I drew this in an Emilio Braga notebook with Bic 4-way multicolour ballpoint pens.
drawing faces 