Norman Mailer

I did this one entirely in ballpoint pen while waiting for After Effects to render a scene at work.

I've been watching some of the digital podcast Joe Bluhm does and it's inspired me to try actually rendering a face instead of doing simple line work. It's been a really long time since I've seriously tried drawing with values instead of black and white. I think this came out okay, but ballpoint pen is really unforgiving, and it's hard to make hatching look like midtones instead of lines scribbled on a face (after scanning this in I erased some of my more glaringly bad lines). The illustrator James Jean does shockingly fantastic sketches in ballpoint pen, I guess he just never draws a bad line.

Also, just to be honest here: I've never actually read anything by Norman Mailer. He's on my (embarrassingly long) list of well respected authors I haven't gotten around to checking out.