Hello,
It has been soooo long since the last time I've ever wrote something about the art of black pen. Honestly there was a technical glitch which we all experienced once a while in our life.

Well, it was irritating when your creative juice was flowing yet you weren't be able to share them just because of some technicalities. or due to your forgetfulness. urrrgghh.

The simplicity and the spontaneity of having a piece of paper and a black pen to begin with is the easiest way to capture one's imagination regardless of where he was and what he was doing; except for swimming or sleeping...

I did quite a bit of sketches and doodles in those boring meetings when they select you as part of the committee yet the chairman monopolized the floor just to shove his ideas down our throats. Ever felt being trapped in a civilized cage of morality and etiquette of modern dimension?

I felt trapped most of the time in such meetings and my easiest escapism to do doodles and sketches. It was almost like a daydream...you draw anything to escape the boredom.

Here are some of them:
 
The sketch of an old seaman was initiated during one of those meetings. I was really out of idea of what to do to ease off the boredom. As usual my tool was faber-castell 0.5 nip using wet ink. The other alternative is to use an oldskool style nip pen with either osmiroid or pelican ink. this will add the challenge as you have to race against the time as the ink gets dry rather quickly.

Using only normal blue ball-point pen which they provided me during the meeting, I found myself daydreaming travelling a holiday in Europe during summer. I imagine some German or Austrian town

Suprisingly I found the pen quite versatile in making various thickness of lines to create a sense of form and space in the drawing.

Broad range of hues/shades from light to darkness can be achieved using hatching and cross-hatching techniques. I enjoyed playing with the sense of subtlety to create a mood of silence, harmonic and the ambience of fresh, clean European summer in my dream.

This was a simple sketch of one my classmate, Juliana Kamal, I think, who happened to sit in front of me in one of those boring lectures. A simple sketch using a blue ball-point and a page of my diary.

In one of the page of this diary, there was another significant sketch of an old man sleeping at Pudu Raya at around 3.00am while I was waiting for the first bus to go to Shah Alam to attend lectures. I travelled all through the night from Ipoh to Puduraya by express bus. It was a totally different ambience of Puduraya which we were so accustomed with.

All those hectic, noise, heat,smelly and sweaty were gone at 3.00am in the morning. It was almost like a man defeated by the grind of the city life. A monstrous structure suddenly became silence except some snores of the tired soul in its bowel.