In this tutorial you will learn how to draw a bee with a pen. We will use a pen as our medium because you can not erase or smudge it with a tortillon. This way you will be forced to focus on drawing lines and only lines. With a pencil it will be too tempting to erase your work. You will have to draw what you see and work with your mistakes.

Feel free to follow this tutorial using another image. Just make sure your image contains a lot of lines and not a lot of shading. Here is my finished work beside my reference photo:

Begin by drawing the outline of the image. Just make sure your lines are quite dark. If you do not like your outline the first time, try again on a new sheet of paper. Use a ruler if you can not get the proportions right, or draw the outline upside down. When you are finished the rough outline, and are happy with it, go over it again.

Next, look for all the darkest areas and fill them in with your pen. Always work from the darkest areas to the lightest areas. The reason why is because the more times you go over a line the darker the area will become. You will want to blend all your dark areas into your light areas. If the area changes from very dark to light quickly you will have to use very small short pen strokes. As you get closer to the light area you will use a lot less pen strokes. If you are not sure what I mean, take out a separate sheet of paper and experiment on it.

If you want breaks in your drawing, for example, see where the foot meets the body, angle your strokes a slightly different way. Or, if you want it to look shaded, pen your strokes multiple ways.

You can use the enlarged photo below as a reference, or make up your own style.