37 Pen Sketching Ideas for Beginners With Ballpoint References
A ballpoint costs almost nothing, never needs sharpening, and refuses to let you undo anything. That last part is why it makes you better: every line stays down, so you learn to look longer before you commit and to build tone from repeated strokes instead of smudging it into place.
The portrait above is the whole medium in one page: the face is accurate, but built from loose scribble that runs past the jaw and off the paper. Nothing is erased, and the leftover searching lines carry the energy. That is the trade — you give up correction and you get life.
Ballpoint is a natural fit for weave work, and these fabric texture drawing studies show how density of line alone can carry linen, burlap and scrim.
Pen suits outdoor work because there is nothing to smudge, and these nature sketch ideas give you thirty landscape references to take the ink out on.
On the evenings when nothing seems worth starting, these sketching ideas when bored hand you 24 decided subjects with a reference drawing for each one.
Ink suits landscape work particularly well, and several of these scenery sketch ideas are worked entirely in line, including a valley study that takes a couple of hours.
The 37 references below are all pen work — ballpoint, fineliner and gel, in blue, black, violet and red. Each names the specific problem it solves, so you can pick by the skill you want rather than by whichever picture looks nicest.
If you want to branch sideways, paint markers change the rules entirely and this collection of things to draw with Posca pens shows what opaque ink does on dark paper. Ballpoint also suits round subjects unusually well, as the scratchy shading in these soccer ball drawing ideas demonstrates. And once these feel comfortable, our 24 unique pen sketching ideas push the same tools further.
37 Pen Sketching Ideas to Draw This Week
1. Stylised Figure With a Solid Black Mass
Everything above the collar is thin, nervous line work; everything below is filled solid with ink. That contrast is the drawing. The black torso pins the figure to the page, and the spidery neck and hollow eyes read as fragile only against all that weight.
Draw the head and shoulders lightly first, then decide which single shape gets flooded. Fill it in overlapping directions rather than scrubbing back and forth, so the black stays flat and dense instead of glossy.
2. Profile With a Messy Top Bun
A profile gives you nowhere to hide: the forehead, nose, lip and chin all sit on one silhouette, and a millimetre of error on the nose changes the whole face. Get that outline right in one continuous slow line before you touch anything else.
The bun and the flyaway strands are the reward for the discipline. They are drawn fast and loose, three or four long arcs each, so the tidy profile edge has something wild to push against.
3. Portrait With Heavy Square Glasses
Glasses are a construction test. The frames wrap around the skull, so the far lens is narrower than the near one and the arms disappear at the temple, not at the ear. Get the perspective wrong and the face behind them stops being solid.
Notice the shading trick here too: the lenses cast a faint shadow onto the cheek, and the eyes are drawn slightly darker inside the frame. That is what stops the glasses looking like they are floating in front of the head.
4. Tilted Head With Wire Frames
The head is tipped, so every horizontal on the face — brow line, eye line, base of the nose, mouth — tips with it. Beginners draw the tilt into the outline but keep the features level, and the face reads as broken.
Rule those three or four tilted guide lines lightly across the shape before you place a single feature. The thin wire frames here follow the same tilt, which is exactly why the whole thing sits believably in space.
5. Face Emerging From a Scribble Field
The features are tightly rendered in the centre and dissolve into a dense halo of loose strokes around the edges. Your eye fills in a whole head that was never drawn. Sharpest detail at the eyes and nose, near chaos at the outer edge.
Start at the eyes and work outward, strokes getting longer and faster the further out you go. Close that scribble into a clean outline and the effect dies.
6. Low Angle Male Face With Stubble
Looking up at a face pushes the jaw forward, shortens the forehead, and turns the nostrils into real shapes rather than two marks. The hatching follows the planes: strokes wrap the cheekbone, run vertically down the jaw, then change direction sharply under the chin.
Stubble is texture, not dots — short flicks in the direction the hair grows, densest along the jaw, thinning towards the cheek.
7. Upward Profile With Swept Hair
The neck and jaw make one long uninterrupted line here, and the raised chin stretches the throat. That single sweep from collarbone to chin carries the whole pose, so draw it in one confident movement rather than nibbling at it.
The hair is where the ink piles up: long strokes all running the same way, layered until the mass goes almost solid at the back of the head, then breaking into separate strands at the ends.
8. Smiling Portrait on Lined Notebook Paper
Drawing on ruled paper sounds like a compromise until you use the lines as free horizontal guides for the eyes and mouth. A genuine smile changes the whole face — cheeks lift, eyes narrow into curves, and the lower lids do most of the work.
The locs are built as clusters, not individual strands, each one a loop with a darker core. Keep the necklace and collar light so the face keeps all the contrast.
9. Minimal Alien Head
Three shapes and it still has a personality: an oval head, two solid black eyes, a stalk of a neck. Minimalism is a proportion exercise — with so few marks, the size and spacing of the eyes carry every bit of the expression.
Draw it five times, changing only how far apart the eyes sit. You get five different creatures from the same three shapes.
10. Overlapping Circle Scribble
Three circles drawn as continuous looping strokes, overlapping so the crossing zones go darker. It is a warm-up, not a picture: five minutes of this loosens the wrist and teaches you that tone in pen comes from stroke density, not pressure.
Keep the pen moving without lifting it. If you want to take the same principle somewhere more finished, these abstract sketching and drawing ideas build whole compositions out of repeated marks.
11. Split Face in Two Ink Colours
The face is divided down the centre line, blue on one side and red on the other, with the features mirrored across the split. Two pens turn a straightforward portrait study into a statement about duality without you having to draw anything extra.
Symmetry is the difficulty: with both halves visible at once, any mismatch in eye height or lip corner is glaring. Mark the centre line and eye line first and keep checking the halves against each other.
12. Black Pen Portrait of a Young Man
Thick wavy hair, sharp brows, a collar suggested in three lines. This is a clean study with no gimmicks, which makes it a good honest test of whether your proportions hold up without a strong style covering for them.
Note how little is finished: the shirt is barely there and all the rendering has gone into the eyes, nose and mouth. Deciding what to leave out is worth practising deliberately, and there is more on that in these portrait drawing ideas.
13. Two Interlocking Circles
A pure control drill. Two large circles, drawn with many light overlapping passes rather than one nervous outline, with the shared lens shape left slightly denser. Draw from the shoulder, not the fingers.
Do a page of these before any detailed work, so the first ten minutes of bad lines happen here instead of on the drawing you care about.
14. Bold Red Arrow
One shape, one colour, built entirely from parallel strokes running along the curve. The arrow tapers from a thick head to a thin tail, and because every stroke follows the direction of travel, it looks like it is moving.
This is the clearest possible lesson in directional hatching: stroke direction describes form and motion. Turn the strokes across the curve instead and the same arrow immediately goes flat and dead.
15. Turquoise Portrait Looking Up
Swapping black for turquoise changes the whole mood before you draw a single line. The lines are kept fine and feathery throughout, so the finished face has a light, airy quality that heavier ink cannot give you.
An upward gaze means you see more of the lower eyelid and the iris gets partly hidden by the top lid. The curly hair is drawn as separate spiralling ribbons rather than a filled mass, keeping the whole thing weightless.
16. Crosshatched Footballer Portrait
A recognisable face is brutal feedback — a two millimetre error in the gap between the eyes and everybody can see it is not quite him. Build it from measured relationships: eye width against nose width, brow to hairline against brow to chin.
The shading is layered crosshatching, each new layer at a different angle to the last, going up to four passes in the darkest hollows. The beard reads as tone first and hair second.
17. Eiffel Tower in Blue Ink
Architecture is a symmetry and perspective problem. Both legs must splay at matching angles, and the lattice ironwork gets denser and finer as it rises. Do not attempt to draw every strut — suggest the repeating pattern and let it fade out near the top.
The trees at the base are doing quiet work: they establish scale and give the eye somewhere soft to rest. If you want more of this, these building sketching ideas break down how to handle repeating structural detail.
18. Breaking Ocean Wave
Water in pen is layers of long curved strokes that follow the swell, packed tight in the trough and opening up at the crest. The spray is not drawn at all — it is the white paper left untouched where the strokes stop short.
Work back to front: distant swell lightest, then the breaking wave, then the darkest foreground curl. For wider scenes with the same logic, try these landscape sketching ideas.
19. Head Tipped Back
The chin lifts, the throat opens, and the jawline becomes the dominant edge of the drawing. From this angle the underside of the nose shows, the ears sit lower than you expect, and the neck is much longer than beginners tend to draw it.
The tonal work is soft and continuous rather than hatched, built in tiny circular strokes — slower, but it gives you skin that looks like skin.
20. Structured Planes and Full Lips
Instead of blending, this face is broken into flat hatched planes — one for the side of the nose, one for the cheekbone, one under the lower lip. Each plane gets its own stroke direction, and the edges between them do the modelling.
You cannot fake a plane you have not understood, which is what makes it such a good structure exercise. The mouth is a study in itself; these lips sketching ideas cover the shapes and shadows in detail.
21. Anime Style Girl With a Messy Bun
Stylised does not mean easy. The eyes are enormous and must still sit symmetrically on the same tilted line, and the tiny nose and mouth have to be placed precisely or the face collapses.
The shading is smooth gradient rather than visible hatching — many light passes, no hard stroke edges. Bangs are clumps that break at the tips, with gaps left open so the forehead shows through.
22. Half Face in Deep Shadow
One side of the face is nearly white paper, the other is almost solid ink, and the boundary between them runs straight down the nose. Strong side lighting like this is the fastest way to make a pen portrait look three dimensional.
Decide where the shadow edge falls before you start rendering, then commit. Keep a couple of small light shapes inside the dark side — the tip of the nose, the eye highlight — or the shadow reads as a hole.
23. Bearded Man With Lowered Eyes
Downcast eyes change the whole emotional register of a portrait, and they are simple to draw: the lids cover most of the iris and the lashes become the darkest mark on the face. The heavy shadow under the cheekbone does the rest.
The beard is built in layers — a mid grey base of short strokes, then darker strokes concentrated under the jaw and along the moustache line. Leave the chin slightly lighter so the form still turns.
24. Everyday Object: a Phone
After a run of faces, an object is a genuine relief and a real lesson. A phone is a rectangle in perspective with rounded corners, and getting those corners consistent is harder than it looks.
Almost no shading here, just clean confident outlines and a hint of hatching on the screen. Sketching what is on your desk builds observation faster than anything else — these object sketching ideas have plenty more to work through.
25. Crowd Seen From Behind
Dozens of people, not one finished face. Each figure is a head shape and a pair of shoulders, and the crowd works because the figures get smaller, lighter and more overlapped as they recede.
The trick is restraint: detail one person and the crowd stops being a crowd. Vary head heights so the group is not a neat row.
26. Child Reading a Book
The narrative sits in the posture — head tipped down, shoulders rounded, hands flattening the pages. You do not need an expression when the body language says everything.
Hands holding an object are the hardest part of this drawing, and the most worth practising. These hand drawing ideas are useful reference if the fingers keep coming out as sausages.
27. Cartoon Boy in Round Glasses
Exaggeration with a purpose: oversized round glasses, a tiny downturned mouth, brows pushed high into the forehead. Every proportion is pushed in the same direction, which is why the worry reads instantly.
Cartooning teaches you which features actually carry emotion. Change only the brow angle here and he goes from anxious to furious. There are more character exercises in these doodle character ideas.
28. Continuous Line Portrait
Drawn with the pen barely leaving the paper, so the hair becomes a series of loose loops and the face is defined by where the lines happen to bunch up. Closed eyes make it calm rather than chaotic.
Try it with a strict rule: one line, no lifting, no stopping. The results are ugly for the first several attempts and then something clicks and your line quality improves everywhere else too.
29. Smiling Portrait With Braids
Blue ballpoint on ruled paper again, and again the smile carries it. When someone grins the eyes narrow and the cheeks push up into them — draw a smiling mouth under wide eyes and the face looks fake.
The braids are a repeating zigzag inside a tapering shape, darkest where each section crosses the one below.
30. Laughing Face on Ruled Paper
An open laugh means visible teeth, and teeth are where most beginners lose the drawing. Do not outline each one — suggest a couple of separations in the middle, and keep the upper teeth lighter than the shadow inside the mouth.
The curly hair is scribbled fast in clumps and the hoodie is barely indicated, keeping everything pointed at the expression.
31. Softly Shaded Face With Closed Eyes
No visible strokes at all — the tone is built from so many light overlapping passes that it turns continuous. Slow, patient work that shows you how much range a single ballpoint actually has.
Build up in stages across the whole face rather than finishing one area at a time, or you will end up with a dark patch you cannot lighten. Pen does not forgive going too dark too early.
32. Portrait With a Cigarette
A prop at the mouth forces you to solve the lips from a new angle, since they are parted and gripping something. The slight lift on one side changes the whole expression.
Keep the cigarette itself simple — a clean cylinder and a small dark tip is enough.
33. Two Tone Portrait With an Orange Hoodie
One accent colour against all that blue, and your eye goes straight to the hood. Adding a second pen is the cheapest way to control where a viewer looks first.
The pose is honest and contemporary: head down, glasses catching light, both hands on a phone. The big curly bun balances the downward tilt.
34. Tangled Scribble Portrait
The face is legible only in the middle. Towards the edges it comes apart into loops that never resolve into an outline, which is what gives the drawing its momentum.
Work fast, keep the pen loose in your fingers, and stop before you tidy it. Ten minutes maximum — the failure mode is neatening it into something ordinary.
35. Woman by a Window
The only full scene in the set: a figure, an interior, and trees beyond the glass. Three depth zones, each with its own stroke weight, with the window frame slicing the composition into panels.
Keep the outdoor foliage lightest and let the seated figure hold the darkest values. Getting that hierarchy right is what makes an interior read as an interior.
36. Full Body Gesture Study
Structure over surface: ribcage and pelvis blocked in as simple masses, limbs as tapering cylinders, no face at all. Gesture drawings are meant to be quick and repeated, not finished.
Give yourself two minutes per pose and draw the line of action first — the single curve running from head to standing foot. These human figure sketching ideas have more poses to work from.
37. Portrait on Squared Notebook Paper
Grid paper becomes a measuring tool: count squares from the eye line to the base of the nose, then check the same distance on your reference.
The upward tilted head shortens the forehead and puts the ears low, and the crosshatching on the neck is what holds the head onto the shoulders. A good one to finish the set on, because it needs both accuracy and patience.
How to Get More Out of These Pen Sketching Ideas
The references cover the subjects. These habits decide how much you get from copying them.
Pick the Pen for the Job
A cheap ballpoint has the widest tonal range of anything here, because pressure genuinely changes the value of the line, and it is what most of these portraits are drawn with. Fineliners give an even, unvarying line that suits architecture and pattern work. Gel pens run wetter and smudge.
- Ballpoint: best for shading and portraits, blotches occasionally — scribble on scrap paper first.
- Fineliner: consistent width, ideal for the Eiffel Tower and the phone above.
- Gel or rollerball: rich colour, needs drying time and a light hand.
- Paper: smooth and reasonably heavy. Rough paper eats ballpoint tips and kills fine detail.
Build Tone With Strokes, Not Pressure
Value in pen comes from how many lines sit in a given area and how close together they are. Hatching, crosshatching, stippling and scribble all produce grey — just different textures of it. The footballer portrait uses four crosshatched layers in its darkest areas; the softly shaded face uses hundreds of tiny circular passes for the same darkness with no visible strokes.
Go light for the first pass across the whole drawing, then decide what needs a second layer. Pen only travels in one direction, from light to dark, and there is no route back.
Let the Wrong Lines Stay
Nearly every reference here has visible searching lines — false starts around the jaw, hair strokes that overshoot the head. They are what makes a pen sketch look alive instead of traced, and correction fluid always looks worse than leaving them.
If a line is genuinely wrong, draw the correct one darker right beside it. Your eye will read the confident line and ignore the tentative one.
Warm Up Before You Care About the Result
The circle drills above take five minutes and they are the reason your first proper line of the day is not shaky. Fill half a page with loops, straight lines drawn from the shoulder, and a strip of hatching running light to solid black. Many exercises in these sketchbook drawing ideas work the same way.
Pen Sketching FAQ
Can I use a normal Bic ballpoint for this?
Yes — most of the portraits on this page are drawn with exactly that. A standard blue or black ballpoint has better tonal range than almost any art pen, because line weight responds to how hard you press. The only habit to build is scribbling on scrap paper every so often to clear the blob of ink that collects on the tip, since that blob is what smears across a finished face.
How do I fix a mistake in pen?
You mostly do not, and that is the point. Draw the correct line more firmly next to the wrong one and keep going — the darker, more confident stroke is the one a viewer reads. For bigger errors, work the wrong line into something else: a stray jaw line becomes hair, an overshot arm becomes a fold in a sleeve. Correction fluid on a pen sketch is nearly always more visible than the mistake was.
Should I sketch it in pencil first?
While you are learning proportions a very light pencil under-drawing is a reasonable crutch, and erasing it afterwards is fine once the ink is dry. But wean yourself off it. Committing straight to ink forces you to look far harder before each line, and that habit is what improves the drawing — the energy in the scribble portraits above is only possible because nobody planned them first.
How long should one of these take?
Warm-up drills are five minutes and a gesture study should be two. A loose scribble portrait is best kept under fifteen minutes before it turns fussy. The heavily crosshatched pieces — the footballer, the Eiffel Tower — are one to three hour drawings, and rushing the layers is what makes them look muddy.
Where to Start
Pick three that scare you slightly, not three that look like what you already draw. Do the circle warm-up, then give each a single sitting in a cheap notebook where a bad page costs nothing. Ink teaches faster than pencil because it will not let you fidget — after a week of it your pencil lines get more decisive too.
