Parallel Pen Play with Eleanor Doughty
In this demo session, artist Eleanor Doughty demonstrates how to use line weight to bring a sketch to life!
By The Art Toolkit Team
This is a recording from our live demo, Parallel Pen Play with Eleanor Doughty, on October 14th, 2026.
In this demo, Eleanor walks us through using Pilot Parallel Pens. These accessible yet powerful tools work as well for drawing and dynamic mark-making as they do for calligraphy, for which they were originally developed!
Watch as Eleanor develops a parking lot sketch, showing how these pens can build a strong value structure—an important foundation for all urban sketching—and turn mundane scenes into striking sketches.
Highlights from the Demo
Get to know your pen. Eleanor unboxed a pen and shared how to fill cartridges with a syringe, flush pens between colors, and clean between the nib plates.
Customize your pen. Eleanor shared how to file the end of the Parallel Pen nib for a wider range of marks.
Let lettering inspire your drawings. Think of each mark as a stroke with a clean, intentional finish.
Build contrast with bold blacks. Use the Parallel Pen to fill solid dark shapes that give your sketch strength and impact.
Explore expressive marks. Eleanor demonstrated dipping the nib in water to dilute the ink, splattering, and pressing and dragging the nib.
Use shadows to ground your subjects. Treat the shadow beneath a car as part of its shape, connecting it to the pavement.
Follow Along and Sketch
Eleanor sketched the Costco parking lot photo below, and you can also download the reference photo here. She began with bold and simple splashes of watercolor. Once dry, Eleanor sketched in cars and people using playful, expressive lines, punctuated by bold darks and strong shadows. She added texture through splatters and final details with colored pencil. See our Founder Maria Coryell-Martin’s sketch below, which she completed while following along with the demo!
Recommended Supplies
Pens: Pilot Parallel Pens, any fountain pen (especially one with a bent nib), or a square-tipped calligraphy marker with waterproof ink.
Marker/Watercolors: A light-colored brush pen or thick marker, or your favorite watercolors for adding over your waterproof ink sketch.
Brushes: A favorite round brush.
Paper: Smooth, heavyweight paper, such as hot press or lightly-textured cold press.
Eleanor also shared her downloadable $3 online resource, “Drawing With Calligraphy Pens” if you’d like to learn more!
About Eleanor
Eleanor Doughty (dow-tee) is a Seattle-based illustrator and urban sketcher, whose mixed media work captures realistic subjects and imbues them with significance and character. Inspired by artists such as Charley Harper and Masaaki Yuasa, her style is lighthearted and nostalgic.
Since 2017, she has focused her artistic efforts on freelance illustration, ranging from small scale commissions to two story murals, and teaching on-location sketching in cities around the world.
She’s the writer behind her newsletter Hand to Paper, and the founder of Street View World Tour, where artists get together monthly to draw on-location over Zoom using Google Street view, co-hosted with Jenny Adam.
Eleanor Doughty
Website | Social Media | Substack
Thank you to those who joined us live, and we encourage you to explore past demos on our Demos page!
