Splinterlands Art Contest Week 209! - Gargoya Devil

Hello everyone,

here is my entry to this week's Splinterlands Weekly Art Contest.
I decided to do something completely new to me and see how good or bad I will do, and that thing is - going for a ballpoint pen drawing. Again this is the first thing I draw with a ballpoint pen so please be gentle with me, but still any constructive criticism is welcome as always !

Here is the original art of the card:

I went for a page of my A5 sketchbook and did an initial pencil sketch:

At this point I was kind of getting tempted to ditch the ballpoint idea and to refine the sketch and go for colored pencils or watercolor but then I bit the bullet and went for it.

First pen I tried was a gel pen and it turned out that my sketchbook has too slippery pages for it - it has hot pressed paper so I had to ditch that. I went with a Faber-Castell fine liner I got and went in to do some outlines (I am not sure that was the best idea but that's what I felt doing first). Here is the result:

What I learned here was that I am really bad at outlines 😅

So after that I erased most of the remaining pencil and went in with a ballpoint pen and tried a few different tactics for shading - I did light pressure with a tilted pen and I did some cross hatching with directions to give some form and tried to go for some texture too. Here is the final result:

Last thing was adding an accent on the eyes which really made it pop. I am really happy with the end result. It is not perfect that is for sure but I tried something new and I really liked it so will probably try and do some more ballpoint faster drawings like this one.

I hope that you like it and I thank you for taking the time out of your day to check it out!

Have a great day and until next time.