Drawing With Black Bic Biro Pens

Drawing with a biro for some can be tricky but if you have confidence with your drawing you can get over the fact of your biro clogging and produce some great results by using it as you would with a pencil.

The shading methods work the same but you've got to remember a few things about the biro medium.

Your black biro pens could clog with the ink and then the next minute let loose a blob of ink on your paper when you don't need it.

With a bit of practice you can use biros to shade and tone a drawing giving it depth, just as you would with a normal pencil for shading.

Bic fine pens are what I prefer to use as they are often not going to clog with the ink as much and let loose the dreaded ink blobs, but also I have the Bic Mediums to add to the tonal sketch quality that bic pens can achieve.

The following drawing is of a monster creature that I drew as an example of the biro art you can achieve with this art medium and I will walk you through what I did to get the end result.

I started off with an almost really light sketch with the Bic biro and the process of this is to draft the position of the creature and realize the pose that the creature will have, drawing lightly with the biro is easy to do and when it comes to later on defining the structure more, your rough pen marks can be drawn over.

You could get an ink eraser but I rarely use these as I prefer to draw and build a creation much like a sculpture and I could also erase stuff out on my laptop anyway with the art software that I have, just place it in layers and take out the sketchy parts.

Much like the process of drawing with a pencil, a light and dark source has to be thought out, so in my creature drawing I have the light coming from the top left hand side and so therefore the dark shadows are on the opposite side at bottom right in relation to the light source.

The process of shading with a biro pen is somewhat tricky but can be done with a steady hand and some practice with shading tonal values on a separate piece of scrap paper, if you become heavy handed at this stage your shading becomes rather scratchy looking which is a nice effect if you want a sketchier looking drawing but I often look at getting the right shade and tone of the drawing right.

There are some quick pen art techniques you can use to draw and shade with ball point pens and one of the videos on that hub you can also watch below if you want too.