Latvian artist Marite Desaine specializes in beautiful ballpoint pen drawings that can easily be mistaken for elaborate paintings.

In the right hands, the humble ballpoint pen can be an amazing art tool, and we have featured some pretty amazing ballpoint drawings in the past, but nothing quite like the artworks of Marite Desaine. The Latvian artist first took the internet by storm with her awe-inspiring drawings back in 2014, soon after graduating from art school, when a number of prestigious art websites and blogs picked up her work. And for good reason, her style was unique, and the artworks – mostly landscapes – looked more like colorful paintings than drawings.

Photo: Marite Desaine/Instagram

It was obvious that a lot of time and work went into these amazing works of art, and Desaine herself admitted that each piece takes around 30 hours to complete. And this may be one of the reasons why the talented artist gradually gravitated away from the art form that brought her so much success.

Although Marine Desaine’s ballpoint pen drawings are still doing the rounds on social media, most of them actually date back at least six, or seven years. Browsing over Marine Desaine’s Instagram, you’re not going to notice a lot of ballpoint pen drawings. She mostly dabbles in painting and digital painting these days, for some reason.

In one of her posts, Desaine actually addresses her departure from ballpoint pen drawing as an art form, but hints that she may return to it someday.

“So long time ago I was a ballpoint pen artist, but over these years I’ve been struggling to keep focus while drawing,” the young artist wrote. “Since I’ve been streaming on Twitch for a few weeks, I’ve found it to be just the right amount of distraction and I’m planning to draw with pens again. I think.”

Hopefully, she does go back to her unique style of ballpoint pen drawing, because it really was quite something!