They might look like sharp photographs of ordinary people, but the images below are actually ballpoint pen drawings created by artist Juan Francisco Casas.
34-year-old Casas, from Spain, was originally a traditional painter,but started experimenting with the ballpoint pen as a joke, just to see if he could draw something so realistic people would think it’s a photo. It all started six years ago, when he began reproducing photos of nights out with his friends, and he liked it so much that he never gave it up. The joke eventually turned into a quest to show that “it’s not about what material you use, it’s what you do with it.”
In 2004, Juan Francisco Casas submitted one of his ballpoint pen drawings to a national art competition, in Spain. He thought the judges would probably treat it as a joke, seeing most of the entries were actual oil paintings, but he won second place, and things just starting moving from there. Now he’s a well known artist who exhibits his works in galleries around the world and sells them for thousands of euros, each.
His amazing works, measuring up to 10 feet high, take up to 14 ballpoint pens and up to two weeks to complete, but the final result is absolutely mind blowing. The only drawback of the ballpoint pen is that errors can’t easily be erased, so Juan tries to be extremely careful, especially towards the final stages of the drawing process.
