Uni-Ball Pen Refill Cartridges Arrived

I ordered some refill cartridges for my Uni-Ball Signo pen, and they arrived in the mail today. I was complaining that it looked like it was cheaper to buy a whole pen than the cartridge by itself, but searching deeper through Amazon I found a good deal. The trick was to use the name “Mitsubishi” in the search, which is the parent company of Uni-Ball. I had to go all the way to Japan for the order, but they didn’t charge for shipping. The estimated delivery time was stated to be a month, but wound up being only 12 days. The pens I have are .38mm, and these cartridges are .28, but they fit fine in the pen, and there’s no noticeable difference in the line.

(Note: It looks like they raised the price a little. My order was only $10.36 – still cheaper than 10 whole pens which cost $16 + shipping.)

Drawing Updated: Rick on Guitar

I decided to put a little more ink on my last drawing, and here’s the final version. He’s playing those cement factory blues.

I used the Uni-ball Signo pen for most of it, but I went over the darker areas with a ZIG Millennium marker to get a deeper black. The paper is 12 x 16 inches.

New Drawing: Rick on Guitar

This is a sketch I made of my friend Rick playing guitar outside by a factory and creek. He likes that spot because it’s near his home, and he can play and sing as loud as he wants. Not sure what the factory does. I think it has something to do with cement.

Appreciating Artist Anthony Ravielli

Anthony Ravielli was an artist for books, magazines, and advertising. I’ve found a couple examples of his paintings, but the vast majority of it is drawn in an engraving style that appears to be done on scratchboard.

He worked for many years with Sports Illustrated, drawing “how-to” illustrations for a range of activities, such as golf, baseball, and fishing. Many of these were later collected into books that are prized possessions of lovers of these sports.

He also illustrated many educational children’s books on subjects of science and biology.

Ravielli passed away in 1997 at the age of 86.

Drawing Finished: Portrait of Alice

I’ll call this finished, even though there are a few spots I need to clean up.

This took three pens to complete. I went online to buy some replacement cartridges for the pen, and found that it’s actually cheaper to buy a whole pen than it is to get the cartridge by itself. Seems silly, not to mention wasteful.

Drawing Update 2: Portrait of Alice

Making progress on the drawing of Alice. I’ve got her neck and shoulder filled in, and still need to darken the top of her hair and fill in the background. I may have to go a shade darker on the background, but won’t be able to check that until I get her hair finished.

Drawing Update: Portrait of Alice

Here is a closeup of the new drawing showing the area around the face that I’m currently working on. I wanted to show how I drew down the lines to get to this point.

In this picture above I made a “before-and-after” to show how I’m filling in the background area. You’ll notice that the lines are curved, and that I’m not too particular about keeping them clean and straight. Since the whole area is going to get covered in ink, I don’t need to worry about carefully drawing each line; although, there are some lines going in certain directions that I want to make slightly thicker and more pronounced so that it’s all not just an even gradient tone. The lines are also curved to give it a more organic look. After filling a row of lines, I go back and grow out the dark area with short strokes, making those little white dots smaller, and smoothing out the tone. It helps to occasionally step back a few feet from the drawing to see where I need to add more lines.

Before I got to this state on the upper cheek, I was hesitant about how to proceed. I had stippled in an area of small dots to give a light value to this section, but wasn’t completely happy with how it looked. I decided it needed to have lines drawn across it to get the texture that I wanted, but wasn’t sure in what direction to draw them, whether horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. So, I took a photo of the drawing at that point, and loaded it into the digital program, Painter, to test it out, and then settled on a horizontal direction.