On Drawing A Thing

I don’t remember when I started drawing solely with a pen, but I remember the reason: I’d become tired of my portrait work with charcoal and wanted to try something a bit different to reinvigorate my love of art, which had fizzled out.

At the time I loved crosshatching and similar techniques which I felt created depth with little tools involved, and wanting to try something similar myself, so I went to work.

One such piece, seen below, is a sketch I did of a selfie I’d taken. I thought it would be a fun challenge to capture the human eye—infinitely painful to get correct, as any artist will tell you—in both a realistic and simplistic fashion.

I never did more than what you see here, but one day I’d like to go back and finish it as a full self-portrait.