Disposable Pens
Caterpillars, butterflies and moths on disposable pens.
A series of ink and watercolor paintings.
Ditch disposable pens! Or maybe just think about it.
The luscious colors of capitalism
Buy and throw-away!
Shiny little colourful plastic products
They come in a million of variations!
Bright colored!
Handy!
Pretty!
But only for a short time…
…until they become waste
Buy and throw-away!
I personally stopped buying disposable pens a decade or so ago. Not for environmental reasons, mind you.
No, just because I had such a ridiculous amount at home that I decided it was time to use them up before buying new ones.
A few years later and while I was (finally) starting to understand the impact of human activities on the environment, I decided to keep those pens for a possible future artwork.
Only recently have I made a caterpillar sculpture onto one of them.
And this prompted a whole series of watercolor paintings.
Now the core idea is to eventually make a zine of all these paintings. (and maybe of the sculptures if I manage to make those as well)
Are you going to save the world if you stop using them? Of course not.
I just hope this will open up discussions and thinking about the items we use, why we use them and if it makes much sense to use them in the first place.
The goal here is certainly not to make you feel bad about using disposable pens. I know enough artists who have tried without but come back to them for plenty of reasons. That’s ok. I don’t believe that anyone can be perfectly sustainable in the XXIst century.
If you want to give it a go, a few options would be pencils, colored pencils, fountain pens with converters, dip pen and ink and of course, paint and brush.
For a more visual approach of the project, you may watch a recent vlog I did about it on my YouTube channel.
I also decided to explain the technical aspect of how I drew and painted these, with free outlines if you just want to do the colouring.
The class is on Skillshare.
Finally here all the paintings I did, they’re also available in my shop if you are interested in one of them.
