I beg you pardon BALLPOINT PEN????????
HOW (genuine question tho I'd love a bit of insight on your art process if that's okay)
Hi! You’re my first ever ask here on Tumblr, and I’m ridiculously excited about that! Thank you for the question! I’ll do my best to answer it. 🥰
Back when I first started out in life, I couldn’t afford microns or other fine art supplies, so I started doodling with ballpoint pens. I realized pretty quickly that, if you use a light touch, you can get the same effect/shading as using a pencil (but without the annoying byproduct of accidentally smudging a drawing!) There’s no real trick to what I do— it just takes time to build up the layers. You start out with a really light touch and shade it the same way you would with graphite. Ballpoint is so versatile, and there’s really no wrong way to use them!
I am thankfully now in a place where I can afford microns, so I use them for darker darks! I try to finish as much of the base shading in ballpoint as possible before using the microns, because it’s really easy to make everything too dark (as almost happened with Cutting Board.)
Luckily, I have plenty of white gel pens now, too! As long as the ballpoint layer is light, white gel pens work really well as a sort of eraser. If there’s a part of the drawing I don’t like/is too dark, I’ll use the gel pens to (sort of) “erase” my progress, let it dry, and then start over with building the layers. That’s why most of my drawings have a bluish tint to them.
One downside is that using the gel pens too many times —in the same place— is hell on paper (I use 100lb Bristol. Anything thinner, and I’d punch through it! That’s the last thing I want to happen after spending a few hundred hours on a piece of art! It… has happened. 💔)
The other downside is that, once you use the white gel pens in one place, you pretty much have to use them uniformly on the drawing, or else the end result doesn’t look right! So, I also use them as a way to highlight areas of the drawing where the light is most concentrated.
My goal with my general style is to complete as much as possible by hand, so I don’t have to rely on digital cleanup or color adjustments after the fact. I hate using my tablet— for whatever reason, it just doesn’t give me the same kind of dopamine burst/satisfaction as drawing by hand!
I hope I answered your question! It’s challenging to break down what I do in words, because so much of the process is intuitive at this point. Once I start the ballpoint pen stage, I kinda zone out while listening to music/audiobooks and just… go, until I think a piece looks finished (or I get sick of looking at it.)
