Switched from pencil to a plain ballpoint pen for my daily doodles

I always thought you needed fancy art supplies to make a sketch look good, but I ran out of pencils last Tuesday and grabbed a cheap Bic pen off my desk. The problem was my pencil sketches always looked too light and messy, but with the pen I had to commit to every line and it forced me to simplify things. Turns out that limitation made my doodles look way cleaner and more confident. Has anyone else found a random tool that totally changed their drawing game?

3 comments

3 Comments

rileyb6110d ago

The thing nobody mentions is how a ballpoint pen changes your whole approach to shading, not just linework. With a pencil you can blend and smudge, but a cheap Bic forces you to hatch and cross-hatch like those old comic book artists. I started using a blue ballpoint for the same reason, and now my shadows have this unexpected energy from all those tiny lines jamming together. Plus the ink has that slight oiliness that catches on rough paper, so each stroke has this little texture you just cant get from graphite.

brian3289d ago

Draw stick figures myself. Still got that box of Bic blues from college. My shading looks like a spider fell in ink and had a seizure. But yeah the texture thing is real. My sketchbook pages feel greasy after a while.

the_brian4d ago

Wait, is that the oily paper thing you're talking about? I got the same thing with a Pilot G2 I found in a coffee shop. It left this waxy trail that made my little doodle monsters look like they were sweating. But then I realized I could use that ink buildup to make shadows darker by going over the same spot, and it started to look like I was actually trying to add depth. Now I keep a blue Bic in my work bag specifically for lunch break sketches because it forces me to pick my spots instead of just scribbling everywhere like a kid on a sugar rush.