Today I revisited a technique I haven’t seen since my early days of college, crosshatching and pointillism. Drawing for after dot or line after line, carefully and methodically isn’t exactly what I would call fun (I was told that “patience” is the key…..okay, right) but I have been revisiting techniques that I’m not so fond of to strengthen my art (and my hand, because I’ve been getting some cramps worse than typing this blog on my phone)! Okay so here we go what do I draw? What’s laying around? I have a lense cap, probably not a good subject. I have my dog, well she’s cute but I’m NOT drawing all that hair! Ok let’s be a typical artsey subject, fruit. Typical, but effective! I have a pear, an apple and a lemon, sounds like a good start! Let’s start with the outline and basic blocking in of tones with pencil of the pear, not so hard. I get my inker now (Micron 1) and start making lines, but should I contour them to the shape or just do straight lines? Well I decided to make these long lines that followed the shape and it was a hot mess. Next. Shorter lines all over the pear shape came next and this seemed to look better. I looked up cross hatching technique on Google (really what did we do without Google!?) and saw that this was probably a better approach. Excellent, let’s start crossing! Well there’s definitely something both maddening and meditative about doing this, first you overthink everything (is this line too big? Is this line too close? If I mess up it’s all over and you can’t go back)! Yet at the same time line after line and watching the tone and shape of the form break free is calming, once you stop panicking and overthinking everything. It’s kind of like yoga for your hand, it’s tough, you get cramps, but if you can see beyond that and just let the lines flow, you start to see it more clearly. I think I might be a little addicted to this, so it should be interesting to see where it goes!
Happy Drawing!
Alicia
Alicia Heaney 