Ballpoint Pen Practice

I've either taken a break from drawing or just been lazy recently because I haven't been keeping up with posts this year. Usually I start up again whenever I see something, or someone, that inspires me. This time it was the work of Jim Rugg whose work I first became familiar with from the Drawn Blog which I frequent on a daily basis. His ballpoint pen drawings are awesome to say the least.

They remind me of old drawings and sketches I used to do in class a long time ago when I was in high school. I would have 3-5 sheets of notebook paper stacked on top of one another. The top one or two sheets I would use for actual note taking. The next couple of sheets were the ones I used for drawing and then I would usually have a final bottom sheet to give the ones I was drawing on a softer surface so that it would be easier to shade and bring about a smoothness to the pen, rather than pen and paper on a hard solid surface. Had I kept all the "doodles" (I hate that word) that I created back then (and some in college), I would have at least a hundred. But sadly they're all gone... Then again, I doubt they were even as good as I thought they were back then.

Unfinished practice in ballpoint

I wanted to try it again. Even though I mentioned in earlier posts that I was going to try ballpoint pens again, I have yet to fully experiment with them (besides this drawing). I'm going to look into getting a set of colored pens and really bust out an actual, complete drawing. Until then, there's this one from my moleskine.

Obviously it's not finished and I don't plan on finishing it unless I feel that I could add more to it. It started as a picture I found online, but mostly though the face and right arm are what I took from the original. Once I started with the pen he looked different from what I had planned so I changed it up quite a bit. So much so that even if you saw the picture you wouldn't find much, if any, similarities.