My project in Realistic Portraits with Pen course

I loved this course so much!
Why? Because drawing with ballpoint pen is still new to me (I normally draw digitally) and yet there are so few really good tutorials on this medium. I have watched the ones on Youtube and on Skillshare and they are adequate, but in this course Joaquin shows so much more detail than I ever thought was possible.

This course is not just a benefit for drawing technique but also for the image creation ideas - I love Joaquin's blend of photorealistic portraits with fantasy elements. It is something I aspire to create as well. Hence why I chose to draw the actress Liu Yifei (from the film version of Mulan) and blended her with a Chinese phoenix.

Finally, I found it interesting that once the pen work is done, it is not over and Joaquin works on his images in Photoshop. He doesn't manipulate the lines but instead plays around with the tone of the ink and adjusts it to match his preferred printing method. This section was super handy as he shows a number of clean up and adjustment layer tricks that I wasn't familiar with. It helped me turn the base pen drawing into a very clean art print ready illustration. Thanks Joaquin!