Category: Drawing

Booking to LA

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I just started working on my 45th illustrated journal and decided to give myself a treat by binding up a variety of really nice papers into a special book. My new journal is an inch thick slab of 8×12″ 300 lb. cold press watercolor paper, interspersed with some colored drawing paper, and so far it’s been lots of fun to work in.

I haven’t worked in watercolors in a couple of months after my detour through kraft paper and white pencil. My monochromatic sojourn has had an effect on my use of colors that I really like.

I painted this while sitting on the john. I wasn’t constipated, just inspired by our coat rack.

Painted standing at the stove while stirring the sauce pan.

A painting of a photo of a painting of a photo.

My first spread in the book, a great horizontal opportunity, 8″x24″.

Unfortunate painting of my lovely boy.

Airports are great places to draw. All those plane gizmos and bored people.

Painted from the New Yorker and then my first afternoon in Santa Monica.

A few drawings that were interrupted in process but I tried to make lemonade out of them.

Again, drawn while waiting, in one case for my colleagues, in another for the pot to boil.

Drawn while waiting for Karen Winters and her husband. I painted it off site and I’m afraid it shows. Plus one of my waterbrushes isn’t happy about being in California.

A very faintly tinted drawing of Ocean. It reminds of something very old and I like it.

I am sort of lonely here in LA, so far from my family (a sentiment that tends to make me draw more). Nonetheless, I will be meeting new friends while here. Last night I was too exhausted to make it to the Drawing Club but I will be at the rainy day Sketchcrawl planned by the SoCal Drawing Room. Then I start shooting on Monday and will be on the set for the next two weeks. I shall post what I make as I do. I doubt I shall have much of particular profundity to report but I’ll do my best.

Change of scene

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When I was drawing with my pal Roz Stendahl, I was amazed to see that certain pages of her journals were randomly pretreated before she turned to them. She might have a fat, wet brush stroke across a spread or have some lovely textured paper glued onto a page. When she turned to that page, she just worked on it like any other blank sheet.
I found this very disconcerting at first. “What if the colors you’ve slopped onto the page don’t fit in with what you’re drawing,” I asked. She explained that this what made it fun. Each new spread became a double challenge: to capture the drawing and also resolve it with the obstacle she had set up for herself (Roz has just set up a gallery of some of these pages pre- and post-drawing here).
I spent a year with this in the back of my head and then, last month, I decided to try it. As readers of this site will have noticed, most of the drawings I did in December were on orangish blotchy backgrounds. This happened to have worked really well when I was in Mexico, an orangish blotchy sort of place, but that was just serendipitous.

I chose this palette at the beginning of my journal #43 because I had been looking at a lot of 18th and 19th century drawings in sepia ink (best of all the wonderful Van Gogh exhibit at the Met) and wanted to focus on warm colors rather than the black ink and bright watercolors I have been using for the past year. I unspiraled my book and took a handful of pages into the kitchen and one by one doused them in water. Then I took various bottles of orange and brown and yellow Dr. Martin’s and dripped and sloshed them around . Then I popped the pages into the toaster oven and, when they had dried, added some more layers. Patti described the results as ‘very Cheetos’. She also pointed out the drips of Doc Martin’s on the counter that only came out with bleach and elbow grease.
I drew most of the time with Faber-Castell PITT brown S nib pens and did my writing with a dip pen for maximal splashiness. But one of my favorite things about this technique has been the opportunity to use white pencils to bring out highlights. I just love the look of this.

Last weekend, I inaugurated Vol. 44, which has heavy Kraft paper and so I have stopped the Doc Martin’s pre-treatment. I am still using the same media to draw with but am doing a more traditional illustrated diary sort of thing with each right hand page being a drawing and each left hand page a straightforward record of my day. It’s another way of getting a drawing and some writing into each day and also having a sort of ancient looking document to work in. I have fantasies about burning certain pages and sloshing wine around.
Drawing on colored backgrounds is giving me a chance to think more clearly in terms of values. Because I have at least three tones in my palette right off (brown lines, tan paper, white pencil) and then the infinite variations in between (varying degrees of solid ink and cross hatching, different line weights, different degrees of pressure on the pencil from light dusting to solid opaque), I really pay attention to what is the darkest and brightest points in my subject and then try to capture the correct variations in between.

On drawing from photos

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Drawn from life.
Drawn from a photo.
Can you see the difference in detail, in energy, in understanding of the scene?

Occasionally I make drawings from photographs. If I have an illustration assignment to draw something that I can’t get my hands on or a location that is remote or a human in a particular position or a drawing that needs specific detail, I will resort to photographic reference. If I am cooped up in the house during a cold spell and bored with drawing my environment, I may pull down one of the old yearbooks I collect and draw ancient faces. If I am stuck on the runway with nothing to draw but seat backs, I may flip through the in-flight magazine and be inspired by the pretty pictures. But, always, drawing from photos is a hollow experience. Photos are useful reference for illustration but as a basis for real art and for the sort of meditative drawing that expands my consciousness and creativity, I find it a lot less helpful. Far better, I’d say, to draw a cluttered corner of my desk from a half dozen angles than waste time drawing from photos of celebrities or far-off places or someone else’s kitten or the like. I’d rather draw what I see in front of me.
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So what is it about photography that makes for a peculiar kind of drawing experience? I’m going to jot down some thoughts, in some case taking extreme anti-photography positions in order to get a better grip on this phenomenon.
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Is photography more accurate or more authentic than a drawing? Does the average snapshot actually capture what the picture taker originally noticed in the scene? Does the camera see as the eye does? Does the viewer look at a photo and see it as one does reality or as one sees a drawing’s depiction of reality? How long can you look at a photo and remain connected? Compare that with the experience of looking at a drawing or painting, particularly one you made.
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A photo captures a scene without emphasis or subjectivity — it is a mechanical rendering with no human element in the process. It also captures just a fraction of a second of time. Even if the subject doesn’t move, it lacks the fourth dimension, the influence of time on the scene that comes with looking at reality or art – it is frozen and there fore unreal in a fundamental way. Time does not stop. It is difficult to remain connected as you spend more time looking at the photo than the time represented in the photo; the more disproportionate, the more difficult to remain engaged.
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Drawing from photos is really bridging media. Can you imagine drawing from a piece of music or dancing to a painting? I propose that if you did you would not be copying what you see but instead give yourself a lot of latitude in reinterpreting. But when you draw from a photo, do you give yourself that sort of creative license? Great photographers have made many great photographs that are powerful art. I have yet to see a drawing from one that would be considered equally great. Imagine a Diane Arbus or a Steichen or Mappelthorpe rendered in graphite or ink. Ugh.
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A camera sees all in one fell swoop – the focus is deep, the whole scene, from 90Ë™ corner to corner is captured with same emphasis. That is not how the human eye, and more importantly, the human brain see. We scan back and forth at a varying rate, observing more or less, capturing more or less detail, depending on our degree of interest in the subject. Even if we observe a photo in this manner we are not having a true viewing experience. That is why drawings done from photos seem to me to have an inherent flatness (which is further exaggerated by the optics of the camera lens) or an unlikely amount of detail in elements that are not inherently interesting. Photorealistic paintings and drawings are immediately recognizable as having been done from projected, traced photos because of a certain eeriness, the quality of their reflective surfaces, the deadness of the scene.
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Some people are also concerned about the legal issues in drawing from someone else’s photo. Technically, if the picture has been copyrighted and you draw it, you are making an illegal copy. Obviously most photographers won’t bother to hire lawyers and impound your sketchbooks but it is a consideration. More dangerous to your experience as an artist is the practice of drawing something you have actually never seen. Sealing someone else’s vision may not land you in court but it will arrest your development. Stick to your own experience of the world. If you insist on drawing from photos, take them too. It’s so easy to shoot a digital picture and then pump out a print to draw from that there’s no reason to violate others’ copyrights if you can help it.
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Drawing from photos is also easy and faster because the camera has already done the conversion from three to two dimensions. When we draw, we are always selecting between the data provided by one eye or the other, shifting back and forth, picking and choosing. But the camera has just one eye and so it flattens the perspective, seeing just from a single POV. It doesn’t have to choose where one plane intersects another or if a shadow contains variations in light or where one plane sits behind another. All the calculations are worked out for you and you just transfer them form one page to another. Again my brain and my creative-decision-making apparatus are robbed of the pleasure millions of little decisions, the decisions that are mine, decisions that make it art.
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Another consideration is that the composition of the picture is dictated by the original photo and photographer, All too often something will look better when the POV is shifted or the picture elements are rearranged. If I don’t really know what my subject looks like, can’t see in to the shadows, don’t understand the surface and the lighting, this is very hard to do effectively. And again someone else’s photo or my own hasty snapshot will not come close to the careful consideration and particular priorities I bring to the subject when I make a drawing. I also think that a drawing is influenced by what’s beyond the frame – the artist’s experience of the scene and the moment, the sounds, the temperature, the smells, the parts not seen within the boundaries of the frame and again, the time that passes in contemplation of the scene, the moving light, the changing world, the way I, my mind, my body are becoming different as I draw and I capture the hundreds of glances that go into careful observation, glances from slightly different vantages as my head shifts, my lungs expand, my heart beats, all these changes add life to my creation. Drawing is life and life is time.
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If you are overly committed to drawing from photos, think again, long and hard, about why you are drawing. Is it to impress with the ‘accuracy’ and photographic ‘realness’ of your final image or it to have the drawing experience, the life affirming contemplation that comes from slow and intense observation of some object or creature in your environment. Do you get it from drawing from a photo? Maybe you do. I find it hard. Every time I draw from a photo, I feel like a bit of a cheat. When I’m done, covering the content of the photo, transferring it to the page, and I look back to find more, there is none. It’s done, emptied of content, wrung out. It’s like a tracing. But when I draw from life, I can keep going deeper and deeper puling more and more stuff out, as if I am diving between the molecules, heading to the subatomic realm that unites all things. P.S. For further digestion of what I have written here, check out Jay Savage’s thoughtful analysis on the Digital Photography Weblog. P.P.S. For an amazing photo experience. spend some time here.

Dibujo en Mexico*

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We are back after an all too brief trip to Mexico. It’s a country that I have always liked so much but never spent time in before. I would love to do a long cross country sketchcrawl sometime.

We stayed in Puerto Vallarta which is a touristy place with a huge Walmart and we spent a fair amount of our vacation sunbathing and reading trashy novels and eating from buffets and avoiding the horrors of New York in December and the transit strike.

I spent a grim evening at the bullfights watching four innocent creatures being tortured to death in front of several hundred tourists fresh off the big cruise ships., I went in the spirit of seeking out new adventures when possible but left feeling nauseated and vegetarian.

From a drawing perspective, this trip certainly didn’t have the immersive qualities of trips I’ve taken to Rome or Jerusalem or Paris. However I think that even a daytrip to Dayton is made richer by drawing and writing about one’s travels and so I thought I’d set down some things I’ve discovered about travel journaling:

I like to travel fairly light. I carry a smallish shoulder bag with my journal, pens, watercolors. I like NiJi waterbrushes because you can load them with water in the morning and they will carry you through the whole day without needing to carry water jars that could spill. I recommend some sort of folding stool. You can buy them light and inexpensively at camping stores and they let you set up where you want to without having to worry about being in the way or finding an empty bench.

Be prepared but not overly so. Make sure you have enough of your favorite pens but if you pass a local art supply store, always check it out. You may make some wonderful new discoveries. Don’t shlep more than would be comfortable. Improvise. I sometimes rub local soil and leaves onto my drawings for color. I’ve used pasta sauce as paint in Tuscany.

Don’t just draw postcards. It’s fine to sketch monuments and tourist spots but also try to capture local color and everyday life. Draw your meals, travel on public transportation, use art to immerse yourself in a different way of life.

Be bold. I’ve great characters in Roman catacombs, Death Valley bordellos, San Franciscan homeless shelters, and Yorkshire flea markets, all through drawing. Talk to people and don;t be embarrassed to show your work. Most people are impressed that you are even doing it and won’t judge your art as harshly as you do.

Let your art be your tour guide. Every minute you’re lying in your hotel bed could be spent drawing. The more pages you fill, the richer your memories will be. I still remember the sights and sounds of street corners from years ago just because I spent twenty minutes drawing somewhere. The memories are so much more intense than if I’d just been seeing the sights through a tour bus window.

Jot down notes as you draw, not just recording the where and when but conversations you overhear, thoughts and associations you make, smells and sounds specific to the place. Show how travel broadens your mind.
—–
*Translated by Google. Apologies if it’s garbled.

Pens of the Moment

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These days, I have quite a nice little arsenal of pens (here each presents a self-portrait), and they are influencing how and what I draw more and more.
First off is (1) my trusty nib holder. It’s a General’s #204B with a cork finger grip area, now deeply dyed with a couple of years of various inks. Despite my collection of nibs, this one is permanently in my holder: aHunt Ex-Fine Ball Pointed (my sight is beginning to go and Jack had to read the tiny letters off the nib) with a nice big reservoir hole. It’s a squishy nib that can draw very fine lines or big fat ones.
(2) came from Venice with my Friend, Tom. The holder is champagne colored Murano glass with steel hardware and it’s a lot more solid and weighty than everyday pen. I like the weight but am nervous to carry it away from my desk. It came with this nib that looks like a steak knife which lays down sharp lines, a little less flexible that the Hunt. In my current journal I am only drawing in browns, blacks and yellows � my main inks are Doc Martins’ radiant concentrated Sepia and Golden Brown and Daler-Rowney’s FW Acrylic Artist Ink. The former is a little more transparent that I always want, the latter is thicker, almost like paint and takes a while to dry.
(3) I’ve mentioned my bamboo pen before. I use it with any ink but most often Sum-i ink in a heavy stone inkwell. It draws all sorts of line depending on how hard I press and feels lovely and organic.
(4) is a Faber Castell PITT pen, brown ink, preferably, S or F, and usually in my pocket. The ink is permanent so I can watercolor over it right away and depending on the age of the pen it can be smooth and creamy or scratchy and textured. I can draw very little broken lines with it or bear down and make dark ones. It’s less alive than dip pens but the best marker I’ve found.
(5) After years of searching, I found a fountain pen I really like. I got it in Italy: a Columbus Maxima and it’s very heavy and silver and cost about 80 Euros. I use disposable cartridges with non-waterproof ink which I can smear with a wet fingertip. At first, I thought the tip was too stiff but I carry it with me everywhere and it had become a good friend.
These pens tell me quite a lot about my drawing at this stage. I like dip pens because they slow me down — I take my time with open bottles of ink and the small load of ink they can sustain. It also makes me feel connected to centuries of artists who worked in just this way. My love of technical pens like the Rapidoliner has ben replaced by a desire for variable lines that give drawings more interest and life.
It’s also interesting to see how my pen choices have changed. Here’s the inventory I did a year and a half ago. The entire original cast has changed.

Going to Van Gogh

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Inspired by van G, I have been drawing with a bamboo pen of late.

On Friday, Jack and I headed up to the Met to check out the van Gogh drawing show. It’s the first time that all the known drawings have been assembled in one place — they’re fragile and very sensitive to light — and, after Jack’s school conferences in the morning, I decided that visiting them was a better way to spend my afternoon than revising Chase checking ads. Hooky is good for the soul.
There are four or five rooms full of drawings and a half dozen paintings and they are arranged chronologically so you can get a sense of his progress. Right off, I was struck but how much better he was at the beginning than I’d thought. I have always disliked the Potato Eater period and thought that his early drawings would be hamfisted and ugly. In fact, they are quite accomplished; however, he had the beginner’s anxious tendency to overwork. Most of the drawings are thick with heavy-handed lines. It also seemed that he was so anxious to develop himself into a commercially-viable genre painter that he was unoriginal and struggling. He even spent a very brief period in art school; his academic nude is embarrassingly mawkish — he is clearly not working from instinct but trying hard to fit in. It was only after he’d left Paris and found himself in Arles that his drawings really took off.
I discovered that he was always a bit of an art supply freak — particularly in his first few years, he did drawings that used graphite, ink, watercolors, thinned-down oil, pastel, all in the same pictures. His most lovely works were done in just sepia ink and the variety came from his lines rather than his media. He had so many ways of making lines, swirls, hashes, dashes, circles, dots, capturing the rich textures of the countryside, the soft waving wheat, the dried, gnarled trees, the prickly cypress leaves, the delicate wildflowers… WIth just reed pen and ink, he could capture layers of mists sfumattoing off to the horizon. Most evocative was the way he rendered the harsh, ever-noon light of Southern France; the high contrast and deep shadows makes the heat wave off the page.
I was struck by things he does that I probably should do but don’t. He’d redraw good drawings and perfect them. Back at the studio he’d paint from drawings done in the field. He’d do drawings of paintings he’d done and send them off in letters to friends, relatives, potential patrons; I was interested in how in different drawings of the same painting he would emphasize different aspects of the composition —  making it more abstract, more colorful, more accessible, depending on what would appeal to the particular audience. I just never work my stuff through that way. I like to think of VvG as being very spontaneous and visceral but he was obviously a lot more thoughtful and deliberate than I am.
He gave a couple of the paintings a painted edge which the catalog explained as an attempt to make them special and more ready for sale. One even had a crude marbleized paper matte. SItting on one of the rare benches at the show, I wrote in my journal, “How could people at the time not have bought these? I want to take them all home.”

Releaf

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On Sunday, I took the first drawing class I’ve had since I was eleven. It was at the Open Center, a sort of granola-y place in Soho which offers many new Age classes on creativity, meditation, and other sorts of grooviness.
My particular class was called “Drawing as a way of being” but I’d not been lured so much by the title as by the teacher’s teacher, Dr. Frederick Franck. I learned a lot about drawing from Franck’s books, The Zen of Seeing; The Awakened Eye; A Passion for Seeing, etc and, now that he is ninety six, blind, and deaf, he has passed his workshop duties onto Joanne Finkel, a fiftyish woman with bright eyes, pigtails and well-furred calves.
Most of the other students identified themelves as undrawers, anxious about their inability, and armed with Venti Starbucks and Pearl Paint bagfuls of art supplies. My supplies were new too; I decided to abide by the class materials list and had a mechanical pencil loaded with .5 HB lead and a kneadable eraser. Under my arm, I clutched a huge virginal drawing pad.
We did a pleasant meditation exercise and then the teacher handed out leaves. I clicked my pencil a few times and got going on the blind contour exercise. It ws a little dicey at first as I just never draw with a pencil, but by the second pass, I was in the groove.
When we were given permission to look at the leaf as we drew, I got heavily into the details, mainlining the veins that branched off the stem, sinking deeper and deeper into the plant’s very cells. The teacher came by to say, “Wow, you’re really into those veins, huh?” As that was what the leaf seemed to be to all about, I was a tad puzzled. On her next pass, she suggested that I squint and only draw the major landmarks of the leaf. This seemed regressive but in the spirit of being a good student, I complied and felt like a half-walked dog. On the next circuit, she suggested I vary the intensity of my grip on the lead, making lines that exressed where the leaf seemed very clear and where it was ‘less crispy’. It all looked pretty clear to me but dutifullyI rode my pencil up and down with fluctuating line weights, something I rarely do with my ink pen. Before long I recognized Frederick Franck’s style expressed on my page. My drawings looked just like his, not much like mine.
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It’s interesting that what our teacher saw as a pure response to the subject, I perceived as an exercise in style. I was seeing the way she and Franck saw, but not really as I do. I tend to bore deep into things, and to treat every line and detail with similar emphasis. There is something more sensual but tentative (dare I say ‘feminine”) about the varying lines of this new style.
As we broke at lunch for an hour, the teacher dangled the opportunity to draw fruis and vegetables after we returned. I decided to forgo the salad and played hooky. Instead, I went out and bought myself a 1980 Honda motorcycle. In Dr Franck’s honor, I spent the rest of the afternoon drawing the road with my tires, shifting from first to second to third gear, depending on how crispy the potholes looked.

My perspective on perspective

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School’s back on and NYU students wander through my neighborhood, clutching new books and pencils. Quite often, I see some of them set up in the park, preparing to draw Washington Square arch. It’s a beautiful landmark, and I’ve often tackled it myself.
I like the ones who slop around with paint and charcoal but I can’t relate to those who show up with t-squares and turn out tight engineering schema, that look more like blueprints than any expression of soul. To me, drawing is about observation and sensuality more than perfection. That’s my esthetic.
I draw a lot of architecture because they define the landscape we New Yorkers live in. While I’m no Brunelleschi, I understand the principles of perspective. I know generally how to locate a vanishing point and that knowledge can be useful if I’m really stuck. But I think of it as more like understanding the principle of the internal combustion engine; I get it but it doesn’t enter my mind much when I’m driving down the road.
Here’s how I’d go about drawing* the view down my street. perspective-pen.gif
It’s a fairly complex scene so I lay down some little marks first. I find the midpoints of my page (in green) using my pen as a rough ruler. I take the same sorts of measurements of the thing I’m drawing. I also uses my thumbs as rough rulers� so and so many thumb widths to this point, so and so many pen cap lengths to this point � that sort of thing. If I didn’t measure things out like this, I’m sure I would have misjudged how wide the library’s facade was in the foreground. The actual part of the scene that is of interest only occupies about 1/8 of the whole space.
I usually start drawing in the upper left hand corner and work my way across. I’ll make little marks if need be to tell me where things intersect. When I just whip out a long diagonal line like the one in the upper left, it probably won’t hit the mark unless I set a target point.
I’ll also look for some sort of large and broken line somewhere to use as a reference point. In this case, the building on the right has a regular pattern of tiles down its length; I can use this like an in situ ruler to guide the other buildings’ proportions. I count down three tiles and say, ‘Okay, the roof of the ornate building in the center hits this height. Go down one more tile and that’s the point at which the angle of the receding part of the roof hits. Down two more and that ‘s the roof of the building behind it…’ and so on. If there’s no guide in the landscape (as there wasn’t horizontally here) I can also use my pen length to bifurcate the space and create a partial grid to set my reference points.
Remember to check your verticals. Unless you have birds’ or worms’ eyes, make sure your verticals are straight 90 degree angles to the ground. It’s so easy to start leaning them over and soon all of your lines will be out of whack.
I measure other sorts of angles by holding up my pen horizontally and then rotating it to meet the angle. That action temporarily imprints the deviation of the angle from the horizon into my brain. When I go down to the paper, I just repeat the rotation and I can usually get it pretty dead on.
I like to do all these little measurements rather than ruling down the artificial lines of perspective and then erasing them because I am trying to record my own observations in my drawings. I find that all these little measurements bring me closer and closer to my subject and that’s the goal of my work. I don’t care if it’s all accurate and perfect but that it reflects what and how I am seeing. The deeper I go the better. Somehow rulers and perspective lines make it all seem more mechanical and artificial and I just don’t like it.
In any case, the results seem okay to me. In fact, I will often be a lot wilder and just draw lines and angles on the fly. I don’t care that much of my buildings are misshapen and irregular, so long as they feel alive. Those T-square folks seem to make drawings that lie on the page like dead, academic fish.
Drawing buildings is just like drawing anything else. Be slow. Keep your eyes on the subject most of the time. Don’t freak out if you make a ‘mistake’. And do it as often as you can.
Drawing isn’t a science. Don’t reduce it to one.
—–
*Atypically, I drew this in Photshop on a tablet so I could use layers to demonstrate my methodology.

On crosshatching

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As you spend more and more time drawing, there usually comes a point when contour drawing isn’t enough. You can set down lines that perfectly describe the shapes in front of you but you become interested in giving your work dimension and exploring the effects of light and shade. Several people have reached that point recently and written asking me to talk discuss the whys and wherefores of cross hatching. let me try.
Cross hatching is quite miraculous. How is it that black ink lines on white paper have the ability to create an infinite number of shades of grey, to evoke all the colors of the rainbow and to suggest textures and materials and varied as silk and stone, glass and schnauzer hair?
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The first thing to do is to get in the groove. Practice drawing lines until you can lay them down in fairly predictable parallel strokes. Do it in boring practice sessions or just start working them into your drawings. Try greying gradations, filling boxes from pure white to solid black — space the lines far apart in the first box, then halve the distance in the second box, then halve it again in the third and so on until your final block is completely black. Next, try crossing your vertical lines with horizontal ones, weaving darker and darker gradations. Then lay a diagonal set of lines over the grid, upper left to lower right, then cross back upper right to lower left. Try keeping them as regular and even as you can, so you can create various sorts of grey with various sorts of combinations of lines. Don’t make yourself nuts just experiment with lines at 45 and 90 degree angles.
The next things to consider: What do these shades of grey represent? The answer seems to fall into three main effects: Tone, color and texture. You can decide that darker greys mean things in shadow, or that different greys represent different surface colors, or that the lines represent different textures.
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These drawings (by Guptill — see below*) are basically about light and dark. The lines tell you the volume and direction of the light on the object and that’s about it.
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These lines tell you a lot more about the materials the objects are made from; straw, wood, wicker, etc. all accomplished with crosshatching various sorts of lines.
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In this drawings, my pal Tom Kane uses lines to suggest different colors in a girl’s kerchief.
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But here he uses the same sorts of lines to express the direction and shading of light on a girl’s hair.
As you can see, once you start introducing these tones, you have a lot more decisions to make. You aren’t just recoding shapes; you are expressing an opinion about what you found interesting in the scene.
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Consider the differences that values and tones make in these three interpretations of a scene:the various choices evoke different temperatures, distances, moods and degrees of importance.
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It’s interesting to play around with line quality and stippling too: Consider the different feelings these drawings have because of the varying degree of regularity and the direction of the lines used in each identical composition.
My inclination is to avoid incredibly regular lines; they seem mechanical and inorganic to me. I lay down one value in the middle then go back and firth balancing areas with more or less crosshatching until I have described the effect I want. It’;s all a matter of balance and crosshatching is pretty forgiving, If things feel off, just go back and hit your darker areas with a new layer of lines to get the emphasis right.
Like so many things in drawing, there aren’t a lot of hard fast rules or rights and wrongs. Crosshatching is just another opportunity to record your observations, capture your feelings and have fun. And there’s something about that hypnotic regularity of drawing parallel lines that is very soothing.
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“Drawing is just an excuse to crosshatch”— R.Crumb
———–
* The greatest practitioners and teachers worked and published in the 19th century, when every day’s paper was full of endless engraved examples of cross hatching. I have learned a lot from the publications of Watson Guptill, beginning with seminal works by Arthur L. Guptill himself, like Rendering in Pen and Ink and moving on to the less encyclopedic but crystalline Henry C. Pitz’s Ink Drawing Techniques. I also love Paul Hogarth’s Creative Ink Drawing. Many of these are still in print or can be picked up cheaply second-hand.