Illustration Tutorial: Ballpoint Pen Exercises to Loosen Up Your Hand

Practice these techniques to loosen up your hand, with illustrator Ricardo Macía

Pen’s aren’t just for writing, you can also use them to create wonderful illustrations. All you need to do is master your technique and get plenty of practice to make your biro your best friend. Illustrator Ricardo Macía (@ricardomacia) is an ink master. He achieves incredibly realistic results in illustrations that are full of detail and texture.

To achieve this level of technical mastery, you need to learn to loosen up your hand and achieve flow. Don’t miss Ricardo’s tutorial, which includes a few practical exercises to improve your strokes. Discover them in the video!

3 Essential exercises to loosen up your hand

First of all, you need to learn the 3 basic types of stroke you can achieve with a ballpoint pen:

Long stroke: stems from your shoulder.
Medium stroke: stems from your elbow.
Short stroke: stems from your wrist.

Now that you know the basic strokes, let’s get started on the exercises.

Long strokes

To do this exercise, it’s best not to keep your elbow into your side, or wrest your wrist on the paper. Simply feel the movement from your shoulder. Divide a piece of paper into six roughly equal squares. Create straight lines moving from left to right inside the first square. Keep going until you’ve filled it completely. It doesn’t matter if the lines get a bit twisted, the important thing here is to feel the flow as you work. Complete the next square with vertical lines running from the bottom to the top. And repeat the process in the next two squares, this time creating diagonal lines, first in one direction, then in the other.

These exercises are a great way to improve the consistency of your lines and to warm up your hand. Finish by making vertical lines starting from the top of the last square and going down to bottom.

Medium and short strokes

Now divide a piece of paper into 12 squares ready for your medium and short stroke exercise. For the medium stroke exercise, you need to start by resting your elbow on the table and feeling the stroke flow from this joint.

For the short-stroke exercise, you need to start the movement from your wrist. The short lines will provide a sense of detail. Feel free to repeat this type of exercise until you feel comfortable.

Love this tutorial? If you want to learn how to master ballpoint pen techniques and generate incredible highlights, shadows and textures, don’t miss Ricardo Macía’s online course: Naturalist Illustration with Ballpoint Pen.

You may also like:

- Realistic Portraits with Pen, a course by Joaquín Rodríguez
- Realistic illustration with colored pens, a course by Javi al Cuadrado
- 10 Easy Ideas to Get You Sketching
- 10 Online Courses for Learning How to Draw Realistic Portraits