SketchBook - Ball Point Rant

I draw organically when I use a pen. My mind wanders, and I only know the direction it goes when the figure takes its final form on the page. With pencils, I plan and plan and plan until the drawing stops making sense. I tend to think too hard when drawing in pencil. In any case, I usually start my drawings with a circle. For me, patterns play a large role in character creation.

 The Ball Point

A blue ball point pen has always been my preferred drawing utensil. 

Ball points remind me of angry doodles scribbled in the cramped margins of my notebook, of disjointed ideas being slashed across their bellies by the lines on the sheet, of attempting to condense my emotions into the white space left at the bottom of a page when I'd written too much on things that don't matter and spoken too little on the things that do.

After finishing with the pen, I move on to color pencil. I usually start coloring at the edges of things, where clothes meet skin, where patterns meet patterns. Peach/pink is one of my favorite colors. I use it as a base or undertone color for the entirety of an image.

I've used ball point for so long that I'm more comfortable drawing with it than with a pencil. I'm loose and quick with a pen, mistakes and stray lines are welcome, but with a pencil, I'm sluggish and self conscious. A mistake feels costly.

Ball points don't have much of a designation other than to create lines. They aren't designer or art pens. They can be anything and I think that's why I like them so much; they reflect a desire of mine to be free-spirited, to not be tied down by a designation. 

Which do you prefer? The pen or the pencil?