 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Allnock and I have a new pen in the studio and it's from Bastion. They emailed and asked if I'd be interested in trying one of their pens. They have fountain pens on their site, but they also had a $125 ballpoint pen and I just had to see what this was all about because I've never had a hundred dollar ballpoint pen and this one is a bolt-action pen. It's made of titanium and it's very shiny. The bolt-action, I think, is this thing. When you want to click the pen to make it come out or in, you just push down on that. You don't have to push left to right. It just automatically snaps back and forth and the pen releases out of the front like a normal ballpoint pen would. The weight of this is super nice and I like a good heavy pen. Some people don't, but I like a good heavy pen, so I was hopeful. So I thought let me give it give it a little test and right away I could see this was one that's going to give me some gray lines because it doesn't have like an immediate flow to it. If you're used to fountain pens, like it's nice when the ink just kind of comes gushing out. It does not do that here. So that means it was going to give me a lot of gray tones and I thought I'd give it a little test and see can I get a nice gradation making lines with it and then all of a sudden I found a spot where I just didn't want to draw it all and then it kind of got itself started again. And I'm going to have to watch that throughout the drawing to see if that happens again. But you can kind of get it started by scribbling again. The pen itself has the clip that you have to have up on top or else it'll run into your hand. I guess depending on the size of your hand. But the other thing is that bolt, that bolt has to be up above your hand or else it also is scratchy and hurts just like that clip does. And I don't usually like to hold my pen down quite that close. I like to hold it further back. So we'll see how that plays out as I get the drawing done. So let's go ahead and get started on the drawing. I like drawing with ballpoint pens on drawing paper. This is Stonehenge drawing paper. It's soft so I can get that varied line. Sometimes if you're drawing on some other kind of papers you won't be able to get that. But you achieve that line by using less pressure on the pen just barely skipping over the surface and it'll give you that grayish looking line. And then to get the darker tones you just go back and forth with it. Not necessarily always the same direction. Even if the fur or the feathers or whatever you're drawing goes in a particular direction. I'll do something like a 30 degree angle and then a 32 degree angle and then a 34 degree angle so that the flow of the line stays going in the direction of the fur or the feathers. But that it keeps adding ink to it and filling in the gaps in between without looking too much like cross hatching because you can do cross hatching but it's just a little bit easier if you can go with light pressure and build up those gray tones little by little. And even though there's some areas that I'm leaving white here I'm going to go back in like underneath of the eyeball of the bird because that's actually a gray. But once I get the really darks around the eye then I can go back in later and darken that bottom side of it and then get a lot of tone within tone. Now you might wonder why a person like me who has ridiculous amounts of hard supplies at my disposal why would I use a regular old ballpoint pen. I mean this is a fancy one it's not just a regular old one but why even bother. Well part of it is because I've seen other people do amazing work in ballpoint pen and I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could do it. But I also find that it's great for things like what I had going on this past couple weeks. I was summoned for two weeks of municipal jury duty in my town and I learned the first week that there's a lot of sitting around waiting when people arrive we have to get there early in the morning but then there's just a lot of checking everybody in and assigning numbers and blah blah blah before our dear starts and everything. So I decided on week two I would take with me a sketchbook and a pen and when you take a ballpoint pen with you you don't need a sharpener you don't need an eraser you don't need any other supplies you just need your pen and your paper and this was just much easier to take with me than something else would have been and it was more fun to do than sit on my phone. So I figured I would just work on a drawing I did the head first before I left the house saved those back of the back of the back like down below the head saved all that portion to do while I was sitting in jury duty and then finish up the rest at home so I could fill in the rest but I did not get on a jury on the second time fortunately but we still only had very few people show up for jury duty so I just want to commend everybody if you get a summons please go do your jury duty don't beg out of it it's really hard on the people who do end up showing up and trying to do our part in society it's really helpful if everybody did that and shared the load a little bit we had 300 people who got a summons and the judge said only 22 of us had showed up and we had two weeks worth so I almost would have gotten on a second trial there were people who were on the first trial who were also on the second they didn't get out of it and yeah not fair not fair but anyway back to the bird and creating all these wonderful darks and lights I love making anything that has to do with wood any kind of sticks and bark it's just fun it's very forgiving you don't have to make it look like anything it just needs to look like like a stick and you can do cool textures with it and everything just going back and forth with it with layers and layers and layers and then once I got it all finished I just kind of looked across to see if there's anything else that needed a little strengthening to add color to it I decided to add a wash of watercolor and these are water color sticks and it's basically watercolor in a stick format that all you have to do is touch a wet brush to it and it turns into paint and even though I'm working on drawing paper I did test out a little bit ahead of time it does make the paper warp a little but I tested the ink that's in the pen so I didn't end up having the pen ink run all over the place if you're going to try a ballpoint pen or any kind of pen with your wash and ink then make sure you test it ahead of time to make sure that you're not going to just like turn into a blob of black ballpoint pen ink but this one didn't move anywhere so I was safe to add colors so I picked two blues a light blue and a dark blue purple and a brown and just I wasn't trying to paint particular feathers I just painted the whole thing because that gave the bird the look of having that shimmer that crows can have in the sun and that gave me exactly the effect I was looking for so I was quite pleased with that and I was not as pleased however with this pen for 108 dollars I was expecting a lot more from it it did do a lot of skipping throughout the whole drawing I did a lot of scratching off on scratch paper to try to get it moving again and I also struggled with trying to figure out how to hold the pen so that I wasn't scratching my hand with the bolt or the clip that made it very uncomfortable for me because that's just not how I hold pens now some people you hold your pen all the way down at the the nib totally might be fine for you so I did enjoy my drawing though I thought this came out pretty cool in my sketchbook and if you're interested in more on the watercolor sticks there is a whole video including this butterfly that you can go check out in order to get a whole bunch of techniques that you can use those watercolor sticks for they are more versatile than you might think so I'll link to that in the doobly-doo that's about it for me I will see you again next time go out in the meantime and create something every day and I'll see you next week