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Chose a $6 pen over my fancy art pen for a lunch doodle, big mistake
Sat down at my desk in Portland on Tuesday to doodle a little cat for my niece, and I grabbed the cheap ballpoint instead of my usual fineliner. The ink globbed up on the whiskers and bled through to the next page of my sketchbook, so the whole thing looked like a smudged mess. I tried to fix it with whiteout but that just made the paper lumpy. Anyone got a cheap pen that actually holds a clean line for quick doodles, or should I just stop being lazy and walk across the room for the good one?
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skylerrobinson10d ago
The whole "walk across the room for the good one" thing is the real answer here, and I say that as someone who has a graveyard of cheap pens in every drawer. What you're fighting is the ballpoint itself, not the price. Ballpoint ink is thick and goopy by design, so it's always going to blob and bleed on thin sketchbook paper no matter how much you spend on it. If you still want a cheap pen for quick doodles, get a fine tip felt or gel pen instead of any ballpoint, those lay down a much thinner line and dry fast. But keep in mind you'll burn through them quicker and they can still ghost through cheap paper, so the fancy fineliner sitting across the room is honestly just less hassle. Save the cheap stuff for notes, not art.
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