Ballpoint Pens As a Fine Art Medium

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Ballpoint pens as a drawing medium are unforgiving. Mistakes can't be covered up as with paints or scrubbed out as with watercolors. They take many hours of work to produce and colors like yellow, brown, and orange are hard to find in traditional ballpoint ink.
What I call traditional ballpoint pens are the ones with oily waterproof inks. They don't run when they get wet and the ink stays on the surface of the paper. Their lines won't spread out when you draw with them and the inks are semi-transparent. These factors give me a lot of control over the density of my lines, and allows colors to have an effect on each other when layered.

The newer gel inks are water based and will wash of when wet. The ink sinks into the paper and the lines spread out very slightly. Somehow these inks don't seem to melt into each other. This makes shading and color blending more difficult. On the good side they also come in a much wider variety of colors including metallic finishes, and non-transparent or "Milky" pastel colors. This gives me an extended choice of colors in the same reliable format.

For me the idea of using ballpoint pens started a long time ago. I was a habitual doodler. I drew on school desks, notebooks, and plain white envelopes that I used to mail letters to friends. This was always in standard blue ballpoint ink. I liked the color. I liked the way I could shade and create textures and I liked the convenience. I could pick up a pen and draw anywhere anytime. There was no drying time or mess as with paints, and there was no smudging as with pastels.

I was introduced to technical pens in high school. I used them to create the black and white cover of a high school publication called Leviathan, a stippled drawing of a tree, and Thunderhead. I like technical fountain pens. They are nothing like flat dull magic marker. I like the perfect smooth black lines on white paper. I like that the ink is so dense that the lines are noticeably raised on the paper and that solid areas take on a glossy sheen. However they don't shade well with the free hand style I use. I find stippling tedious and simply don't like doing the parallel lines that many illustrators use for shading. Sometimes they are great for accenting a ballpoint pen drawing. A good example of this technique can be seen in Cave, or Cherry

I went to Fashion Institute of Technology where I spent two years training in fine art. There I was trained in many techniques and mediums. I learned to paint with watercolors and acrylic or oil paints. I learned to sculpt in stone or clay. I studied drawing with pastels, pencils, charcoal, and technical fountain pens. I printed with wood block, silk screen, metal plate etching, and stone lithography. Ballpoint pens were not part of the training, and in 1976 neither were computers, but I learned how to use both.

Because of this training I can use almost any other art medium. Bird Watching is a pastel. There are pastel Still-Lives and nudes as well. I also have paintings in both acrylic and oil. These and other works both those in progress and those long finished will all be added to the gallery as they are completed.

Ballpoint Pen Art Gallery - Fine Art For Sale Ballpoint Pen Art as signed and numbered limited edition giclee prints

For an article on how to create Ballpoint Pen Art see the Ballpoint Pen Technique page