Ping Pong Experiment

rough drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnettbrush pen drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnettpen drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnettpen drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnettpencil drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnett

It seems my pen drawing skills aren’t what they were back in my pre-animation days, but these exercises might still be interesting for artists who are exploring different methods (like I am). Finding models the right sizes looked to be a little tricky, so I dispensed with live reference for this one!

All were drawn on smooth, white A4 (the blue one was drawn on standard copy paper). The first picture was the rough I traced from for all the others (with the help of a lightbox). The second was drawn fairly quickly (and a bit lazily) with a Faber-Castell PITT brush pen (I’m not used to brush pens, but I can see some of their major potential). The third and fourth were done with Copic pens with the fixed-width, fine points most pens have. The last was drawn with a 0.7 2B mechanical pencil  (Faber-Castell) and a black coloured pencil (Faber-Castell Polychromos). The last also took the longest to draw, but I have an idea involving markers which may reduce drawing time…

Edit – There’s now a colour version!