Ballpoint Pen Art

 

The humble biro pen has for a long time been the tool for some quite astonishing artworks by artists such as Shohei Otomo and Juan Francisco Casas. These two and many othersa show just what can be achieved with a simple ballpoint pen. So I figure I would have a go myself...

I started off digitally sketching as good a version of the design as I could using Procreate. Then I printed that out onto A4 paper. My Japanese geisha lady fighting an Oni demon has been a very popular series for me, so it felt natural to draw a new iteration of the theme.

I printed it out right up to the edge of the page knowing that my actual pen art will be drawn onto an A3 sized piece of watercolour paper.

You can see in the time lapse video below how I drew the piece. It's just one minute long but comprises around 8-10 hours of the total time it took me to draw. It was fun looking for angles and places to hang my cameraphone (via the Gorillapod) in order to get a decent view point.

Despite using a guide image to trace from, it was still up to me to decide on the level of shading and how much pressure to apply with the pen. Any mistakes or accidents would be difficult to cover up. As I'm so used to drawing digitally it took me a little while to get used to not worrying about mistakes. 

After a short while though I just got into the groove and shaded away without worrying too much. I found that drawing multiple strokes of faint lines and building up the layers of ink worked best. Any mistakes would be too faint to notice and could be easily drawn over.

I'm quite pleased with the end result. The biro pen gives very pleasant lines of ink, especially in blue. It is neither pencil nor inkpen, but a medium that offers the best of both. It's also cheap!

I'm looking forward to drawing more biroart, I need to experiment more with shading, paper types, maybe try different brands of ballpoints - there's lots more to play with.

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