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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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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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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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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