The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [94]
At this point, I will show you the technique and a few of the traditional styles of hatching. You will need paper and a carefully sharpened pencil.
1. Hold your pencil firmly and make a group of parallel marks, called a “set” (shown in Figure 10-15), by placing the pencil point down firmly, fingers extended. Swing off each mark by moving the whole hand from the wrist. The wrist remains stationary and the fingers pull the pencil back just a bit for each successive hatch. When you have finished one “set” of eight to ten hatch marks, move your hand and wrist to a new position and hatch a new set. Try swinging the mark toward you, and also try swinging it away from you in an outward movement to see which seems more natural for you. Try changing the angle of the marks.
2. Practice making sets until you have found the direction, spacing, and length of marks that seem right for you.
3. The next step is to make the “cross” sets. In classical hatching, the cross set is made at an angle only slightly different from the original set, as shown in Figure 10-16. This slight angle produces a very pretty moiré pattern that causes a drawing to seem to shimmer with light and air. Try this. Figure 10-17 shows how to use crosshatching to create a three-dimensional form.
Fig. 10-14.
Fig. 10-15.
Fig. 10-16.
Fig. 10-17.
Fig. 10-18. Some examples of various styles of crosshatching.
Fig. 10-19. Alphonse Legros, red chalk on paper. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
4. By increasing the angle of crossing, a different style of crosshatch is achieved. In Figure 10-18, see various examples of styles of hatching: full cross (hatch marks crossing at right angles), cross-contour (usually curved hatches), and hooked hatches (where a slight hook inadvertently occurs at the end of the hatch), as in the topmost example of hatching styles in Figure 10-18. There are myriad styles of hatching.
5. To increase the darkness of tone, simply pile up one set of hatches onto others, as shown in the left arm of the figure drawing by Alphonse Legros, Figure 10-19.
6. Practice, practice, practice. Instead of doodling while talking on the telephone, practice crosshatching—perhaps shading geometric forms such as spheres, or cylinders. (See the examples in Figure 10-20.) As I mentioned, crosshatching is not a naturally occurring skill for most individuals, but it can be rapidly developed with practice. I assure you that skillful, individualized use of hatching in your drawings will be gratifying to you and much admired by your viewers.
Shading into a continuous tone
Areas of continuous tone are created without using the separate strokes of crosshatching. The pencil is applied in either short, overlapping movements or in elliptical movements, going from dark areas to light and back again, if necessary, to create a smooth tone. Most students have little trouble with continuous tone, although practice is usually needed for smoothly modulated tones. Charles Sheeler’s complex light/shadow drawing of the cat sleeping on a chair (Figure 10-12) superbly illustrates this technique.
Soon you will bring together all of your new skills, the basic component skills of drawing: perceptions of edges, spaces, and shapes, relationships of angles and proportions, lights and shadows, the gestalt of the thing drawn, and the skills of crosshatching and continuous tone.
Fig. 10-20.
I believe that this training for precise perceptions is one of the great bonuses of learning to draw. One really does learn to see better through drawing, to see with greater precision and finer discrimination. I feel sure