Ballpoint Basics 2017, Ballpoint Pen with Watercolor Wash, 3 X 10
Getting the most out of drawing media MATERIAL WORLD BY SHERRY CAMHY Israel Sketch From Bus by Angela Barbalance, Ballpoint Basics 2017, ballpoint pen with watercolor wash, 3 x 10. allpoint pens may have been in- vented for writing, but why not draw with them? These days, more and more artists are decid- Odyssey’s Cyclops by Charles Winthrop ing to do so. Norton, 2014, ballpoint BBallpoint is a fairly young medium, pen, 19½ x 16. dating back only to the 1880s, when John J. Loud, an American tanner, Ballpoint pens offer some serious patented a crude pen with a rotat- advantages to artists who work with ing ball at its tip that could only make them. To start, many artists and collec- marks on rough surfaces such as tors disagree entirely with Koschatzky’s leather. Some 50 years later László disparaging view of ballpoint’s line, Bíró, a Hungarian journalist, improved finding the consistent width and tone Loud’s invention using quick-drying of ballpoint lines to be aesthetically newspaper ink and a better ball at pleasing. Ballpoint drawings can be its tip. When held perpendicular to composed of dense dashes, slow con- its surface, Bíró’s pen could write tour lines, crosshatches or rambling smoothly on paper. In the 1950s the scribbles. Placing marks adjacent to one Frenchman Baron Marcel Bich pur- another can create carefully modu- chased Bíró’s patent and devised a lated areas of tone. And if you desire leak-proof capillary tube to hold the some variation in line width, you can ink, and the Bic Cristal pen was born.
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