Colorful Creativity: Drawing a Dragon with a Multi-Color Ballpoint Pen

Dragon Ballpoint Pen Illustration by Ralph Contreras

Exploring Depth and Detail with a Multi-Color Ballpoint Pen and Hatching

For the Inktober prompt of Dragon, I wanted to try something very different for me. I wanted to try drawing the ink illustration with a ballpoint pen. That’s with no pencil sketch to start with, just a ballpoint pen. But not just any ordinary pen, I used a multi-color ballpoint pen I bought at Dollar Tree. It had four colors, black, red, blue, and green.

The whole illustration was done with hatching and crosshatching. I started with a base shape of green hatching marks. This formed the bust, wings, head, and horns. Then I switched to black ink and added the face structure with shadow-hatching lines. This really gave the illustration some nice depth. Then I used the red and blue for the Dragon’s eyes.

I’m very happy with the way this ballpoint ink illustration turned out.