 Hello there, it's Sandy Onak, and today I'm going to be drawing a shark in Ballpoint Pen. It's World Watercolor Month, but it's an underwater drawing, so I'm going to count it. This is a promotional pen someone sent me with my name on it to try to get me to buy pens for my business, which I don't need. I barely use a pen myself for writing things, but I decided I would use that one just to prove to you you don't need a special pen of any kind, you just need a ballpoint. I've seen ballpoint art online, and there are ballpoint artists who I follow on Instagram, and I have thought, yeah that's really nice, you know, that people who don't have a budget for all the crazy art supplies can still do great drawings, and I didn't know what was going to be involved in doing one. I didn't know how long it would take, I didn't know how the techniques would differ from other types of drawing that I've done. And I just sat down with paper and a pen and started drawing. I've done a couple drawings now, I've put some on just regular old computer paper, some on cardstock, this one is on an Arches drawing paper, it's a very soft surface, and it kind of works the same in each one, you want something smooth underneath, so if you have a table like a wood table with texture it'll pick up the texture, that sort of thing. So be sure you have something very flat underneath of it, and then vary the pressure. So just vary it, I'm going to use really light pressure, and I've found that if I start really light and then work in layers, then that tends to work really well for what I'm trying to draw. Now I have no style in ballpoint drawing yet, because this is, you know, only like the sixth drawing that I've done, so it is what it is. However, you can go see more of my little drawings on my fine art Instagram where I have shared a few recently, and that sort of thing was a little bit ago, because I've been sharing World Watercolor Month stuff. It has been all watercolor all the time with daily reels, which are short 30 second videos over on that account, so you'll have to scroll back a little bit to see some of those. One is a dog drawing, and the other one is a waterfall. So I had that first part slow, so you could kind of see what I was doing. Just going back and forth with a pen, literally, that's what the whole drawing will be. So I'm speeding it way up so I can make this a shorter video, because it's hot. And the place I have to sit to do my voiceovers is hot. So I'm going to try to get this done quickly. The layers that I'm putting down, I'm doing in different directions, so you'll have to experiment with cross-hatching and that kind of thing, using different layers of pressure, like different amounts of each direction of the pen, can help to almost eliminate the lines so they start to look blended, as opposed to looking like you can see lines. And that was kind of my goal to see if I could make that happen here. I wanted my shark to look like he was deep in the water, so I'll be doing a background for him after this section of the video that I'm filming, so you'll get to see the end one, but I should show on Instagram, my regular Instagram today, a reel of doing the background, so you can see how that was done, because it was kind of daunting. It was a little over the top to be thinking about covering the whole piece of paper with ballpoint pen, because ballpoint pen, you can't just take a big swoosh like you can with watercolor and cover a lot of the surface. So that took a really long time. So once I finished filming this portion at my drawing table where I have my equipment for filming, I sat down on the sofa in front of a fan and under a ceiling fan so I could stay cool and just filmed a reel doing that in that simple way. That's one of the problems with the heat that we have in my area is that I am air conditioning less. So I adjusted my schedule for everything this month, I tried to get all of my big videos, my YouTube and everything finished early because we had a promised heat wave, they were telling us was coming. We've had over 100 degrees for multiple days and I'm melting, so I don't know by the time this goes live how many of those we will have had, but if you have been following me on social media you'll know how much I'm whining because that is what I do. So I'm continuing to make my layers and shadows across different sections of the shark and I was working from a photograph sort of, I combined a couple different photos because I liked the lighting on one and the shape on another, that kind of thing. One of the things you'll note is that I did my sketch in pen and with ballpoint pen you can get such a light line that it doesn't matter if you get your line a little bit different, you know, if you want to adjust it, make it a little rounder, a little straighter or whatever you can do that, just keep that first layer, the first sketching layer really light and then you can make adjustments by just going over it and darkening things and I'm going to have a whole dark background behind it as well. So even if I were to take my pen out of the lines, I could still fix that. The most challenging part is keeping the light areas light I have found because I immediately want to just get all excited and go into darkening my layers and trying to get them to look blended and that isn't always the easiest thing to do. I will put some close-ups of the drawing over on my blog if you want to just sit and look at it and be able to tell exactly how I ended up with the lines, like do they look as blended as they look on the screen or up close. Just know that everything that you see up close with your nose right up to the paper is not going to look perfect and the close-up views of this don't look amazing but the full drawing looks just great. So there's that. I am going to put this in my shop if anybody is into sharks and wants to buy it, let's see how that goes. If there's an outcry, if there's people who would buy a shark drawing on Cis96, I could put it up there so let me know in the comments if you want that. There's also today a new release from Ellen Hudson. I'm not taking part in the hop, it's an Instagram hop but my cards will be over on my blog and they're really cute. I used watercolor for one and zig for the other and later this week the watercolor one will be a tutorial on Ellen's channel and I'll let you know when that one is up. But you can go check all that out on the blog, the link is in the doobly-do, as it always is. So we're just about to the end of the area where I filmed and then I put the background in and came back and did a little bit of the rest because the background was daunting to say the least. I tried to keep the background to these long wide strokes. Long wide strokes are a little hard to do but at least I could get some sort of a different look for the background than I did for the shark. I didn't want to do a lot of crosshatching, not only was that going to be tiresome but it was going to not be a really great thing for trying to get smoothness and evenness so I figured I would make it just look like the water is hushing across the landscape, the underwater landscape. And I had a few areas where my pen just crisscrossed over something or I made a stray mark in the other direction so I decided to turn them into fish. So there's that. You can adjust things like that by changing your drawing and look at the light that I got on the schnoz of my shark and then the back end ended up disappearing into the background so that the focus was on the front of the shark. That was what I was going for and I think I accomplished that. So there you go. There's my Shark Week drawing. There will be a Shark Week painting on my Fine Art Instagram and it's the cutest little girl shark you ever did see so be sure to check her out. And I will see you guys later. Take care. Bye-bye.