Learning the Pen

I figured I would show some of my old work with the technical pen, since it is something I plan to play around with from time to time. It makes a good addition to charcoal drawings and it really taught me the value of using different strokes and other methods, such as stippling (creating dots instead of line, that value in quantity) and exaggerating contour lines. I find using the pen is sometimes more styalized then a pencil, since you can only fake shading through the density of lines, rather then the tone of them. For myself, it reminded me that when using a pencil you don't need to shade from a black to gray to white tone - you can always indicate where the shadows hit using different lines.