Talented Nigerian artist Patrick Onyekwere creates stunning, emotionally-charged portraits that look more like photographs than ballpoint pen drawings.

Living and working in Lagos, Nigeria, Patrick Onyekwere started drawing professionally in 2015 and has since become one of the world’s leading ballpoint pen drawing masters. A fan of Kelvin Okafor, himself an accomplished hyperrealist artist specializing in pencil portraits, Onyekwere is able to capture and convey the emotions and feelings of his models like no one else. He actually has an entire selection process that starts with inviting subjects to talk about their lives and their culture, before taking a few snapshots of them for reference.

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Nigerian artist Oscar Ukonu is a master of the ballpoint pen. He wields the writing tool with such precision and skill that he is able to draw artworks that cannot be distinguished from high-resolution photographs.

The self-taught artist started drawing when he was nine-years-old, but only got into hyperrealistic art during his time in architecture school. Up to that point, he had relied on the good ol’ pencil, but the moment in tried the ballpoint pen for the first time, in 2014, he knew he had found the perfect tool to take his art to a whole new level. He has been mesmerizing fans of hyperrealistic portraits with his incredible artworks ever since. Okonu describes his creative process as his process as “a practice in time and patience”, which makes sense, considering that each and every one of his pieces takes between 200 and 400 hours of work to complete’

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Samia Al Homsi Dagher, a software engineer and illustrator from Lebanon, has made a name for herself by creating stunningly realistic ballpoint pen portraits. From celebrities to commission portraits of everyday people, this talented artist’s artworks are sometimes hard to tell apart from photographs.

Born in 1987, the Tripoli-based artist started drawing when she was only five years old, and as you can see from the images below, she has gotten a lot better since. She is now considered one of the world’s best ballpoint pen illustrators, and it’s not hard to see why. The attention to detail, the precision of every stroke and dot, the perfect proportions of various facial features, all come together to form drawings that are sometimes indistinguishable from photographs.

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Using only a simple ballpoint pen, Ghana-based artist Enam Bosokah creates stunningly realistic portraits of prominent African personalities.

“A lot of guys have already made their name using pencil, so I decided to use a pen,” Bosokah said in an interview with Anadolu Agency. “A lot of artists avoid pens because of the irreversibility (i.e., the inability to erase), but I believe it is one of the easier tools to work with. When I use the pen it is like I am adding to the paper – I can’t take it back,” he explained.

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Using regular ballpoint pens, UK-based artist Gareth Edwards draws incredibly realistic portraits of celebrities like Audrey Hepburn, Walt Disney, Natalie Portman and Humphrey Bogart with Candy Toxton.

“I began working in ballpoint pen because I was to lazy to sharpen a pencil, or put away my paints at the end of the day,” Gareth Edwards explains the choice of his medium. “The simplicity of the ballpoint pen first appealed to me at school. The initial scribbles I did then, have since become an addiction in trying to create a drawing that is so realistic its deceives its audience into thinking such a detailed piece couldn’t have been created with such a humble source.” And indeed, some of his celebrity portraits look so life-like it’s almost impossible to believe they are more that just artistic black-and-white photographs.

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Doodling may not seem like the right word to describe Jacob Everett’s detailed artworks, but he does in fact use overlapping elliptical patterns to create incredibly realistic portraits of celebrities and homeless people from the streets of Bradford.

“I am a portrait artist working with biro on paper,” Jacob describes his technique. “I produce large-scale portraits using an intricate technique of overlapping elliptical marks, which gradually build to represent the subtle contours of the face. In common with digital images, my works, close up, appear as thousands of tiny ‘pixels’. When viewed from a distance they reveal the subtleties and nuances of individual character.” Using loops to accentuate the tiniest features of the subject’s face is a time-consuming process, and the 23-year-old illustrator spends several weeks on a single piece, concentrating on one section of their visage at a time. The finished product is always an awe-inspiring masterpiece that viewed from up-close looks like a sea of tiny pixels, but from afar reveals all the subtle contours of the person’s face.

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If these incredibly realistic ball-point pen drawings were created by an experienced full-time artist I would have been deeply impressed, but knowing these masterpieces were actually drawn by a self-taught lawyer, I’m desperately trying to keep my jaw from hitting the floor.

The realistic-looking ball-point pen drawings of Juan Francisco Casas are famous all around the world, and I never though I’d find another artist who could use a simple pen the way he does. And, technically I haven’t, because 29-year-old Samuel Silva is a lawyer who exercises his drawing skills as a hobby, yet manages to create stunning piece of art that belong in an art gallery. On his Deviant Art profile page, Silva, who graduated from law school and became a lawyer in 2007, describes himself as ” just a self taught patient hobbyist person”. He started drawing when he was only 2-years-old and developed his own style of ball-point pen drawing in school, by creating “simple classroom sketches in the back of exercise books”. For some reason, he didn’t go to art school, but that obviously hasn’t stopped him from taking his drawing skills to a level I can only describe as “awesome!”

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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.

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Mostafa Khodeir, a talented young artist from Egypt, spends up to two months working on a single one of his ballpoint pen drawing, but the result of his labor is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

The first time that 28-year-old Mostafa Khodeir saw hyper-realistic ballpoint pen drawings, he was speechless, even though, in hindsight, the skill level of the artist was pretty low. He decided to try it for himself, so he started practicing, and after a while he started producing some truly impressive material. Khodeir can spent up to two months on certain drawings, but the result are always impressive.

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Andrey Poletaev is a master of the ballpoint pen, wielding the common writing tool to create stunning works of art that sometimes rival photographs in terms of realism.

Ukrainian-born artist Andrey Poletaev is considered one of the world’s premier ballpoint pen artist, and looking at his exquisite works of art, it’s easy to see why. Although he doesn’t like to be categorized as a hyperrealist artist, his expertly drawn city landscapes and portraits are incredibly realistic to the point where they often get mistaken for photographs. To achieve this amazing level of realism in his ballpoint pen artworks, Poletaev applies up to twenty layers of pen ink on the canvas, and spends hundreds of hours on a single art piece.

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We originally featured the amazing ballpoint pen drawings of Portuguese artist Samuel Silva back in 2021, but he has been buys over the last eight years, and I though we’d take a look at what he’s been up to.

Looking at some of Silva’s incredibly realistic artworks, it’s clear why many consider him the no. 1 ballpoint pen artist in the world. The photo-like level of detail in his masterpieces is simply uncanny, making it hard to believe that he is a self-taught artist who never went to art school. He started drawing when he was 2-years-old, and developed his own style and technique by creating “simple classroom sketches in the back of exercise books”. A lawyer by by training, Samuel Silva doesn’t create new works as often as other artists, but when he does, you better believe it’s something special.

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26-year-old Kel Cruz, an artist from Quezon City, Philippines, is being hailed as a “pixel art wizard”, for his mind-blowing pixelated portraits created with everything from bits of scotch tape and matchsticks, to fingerprints and blood stains.

Cruz, who works as a male nurse, used to create pixelated art the old fashioned way, with a ballpoint pen. But then a rival artist challenged his artistic talent, accusing him that he was using a printer to create his detailed portraits. That inspired him to stop relying so heavily on conventional tools and start exploring unusual mediums. Since then, he has used lipstick, colored tape, rubber stamps, beer and even woven pieces of paper to create some truly awe-inspiring masterpieces.

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We’ve seen highly talented artists burn paper, roller skate, and even kick a football around to create art. But here’s something new – Illinois artist Allan Ace Adams actually scratches away at paper to create breathtaking animal portraits. It’s called scratchboard art, and it involves using an exacto knife to scrape away a top layer of black ink off the canvas to reveal the white clay underneath.

A scratchboard is actually a hardwood board coated with a thin layer of porcelain clay. Another thick layer of black ink is added on top of the porcelain, which the artist has to scratch off in order to create an image. “I explain to people that I’m scratching in the highlights instead of the ‘darks’ like you would with a graphite drawing,” Adams wrote on his website. “Shades of gray can be achieved by how much ink is removed or by applying an ink wash. The ink wash can be scratched back though to reveal the white once again.”

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At just 22 years old, Italian artist Diego Fazo has developed the skill to create photo-realistic drawings using a simple charcoal pencil. His latest creation, pictured below, has drawn hundreds of positive comments on his Deviant Art profile.

Don’t tell me you can tell the image below is a drawing and not a high-definition photograph, because I don’t buy it. In fact people were so skeptical this incredible piece of art was drawn by hand that young Diego Fazo had to put up some photos of the work in progress just to lay doubts to rest. And looking at his-mind-blowing masterpiece, can you really blame people for  questioning it’s hand-drawn?

Like other talented artists who started their careers on Deviant Art, Diego is a self-taught pencil master whose technique matured with the passing of the years. He started out as a tattoo artist, and developed a passion for creating photo-realistic drawings. Inspired by the works of Japanese artists from the Edo period, like Katsushika Hokusai, he managed to capture people’s imaginations with his precise lines and oriental drawing techniques.

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Jason Sho Green uses a simple ball-point pen to create incredibly intricate portraits that are actually made of other smaller drawings.

Whether we’re good at it or not, we all like to doodle, but American artist Jason Sho Green has taken the pastime to  a whole new level with his amazing doodle portraits that look like modern-day mosaics. Seen from a distance, his works looked like detailed recreations of his subjects, for which he uses shadows to outline the fine characteristics of the face, but as you approach them you realize there’s a lot more to them. Jason actually uses a ball-point pen to “assemble” his portraits from various doodles, including images of people, animals and fantastic creatures.

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