Pencil Artist of the Week: Ben Heine

This week’s pencil artist does something rather unusual with his pencil drawings. Ben Heine, a 28-year-old Belgian multidisciplinary visual artist, combines pencil drawings/sketches and photography in a way that plays off of the essential qualities of both mediums. The result is an art form that contains elements of both the real and the surreal, the tangible and the intangible.

Ben Heine graduated with a degree in Journalism and briefly studied painting and sculpture. His photography and drawing skills, however, are all self-taught. He brings these self-taught skills together in his “Pencil Vs. Camera” series to create what has been called “a new visual invention… full of magic, illusion, poetry and surrealism.”

Each piece in this series is made up of a black and white pencil drawing that is juxtaposed against a colorful photographed background in an effort to “amplify the contrast between the two disciplines.” His subjects range from animals and people, to architecture and landscapes. Regardless of the subject, each piece provides a fresh take on traditional photography and drawing and a glimpse into the imagination of an artist.