Hatching.

It’s a familiar technique to most sketchers, but if you haven’t come across it here’s a useful overview by Koosje Koene.

What I love about hatching is its simplicity. You don’t necessarily need to be good at drawing to apply the technique. The difference it makes in creating the illusion of three-dimensionality to a sketch can be stunning too.

At its most basic, it’s just a case of repeating a series of parallel lines to create shade. But there’s more to it than that. Heaston identifies six different types of hatching that produces slightly nuanced results.

I experimented with a couple of these variations in the sketch below. I want to share when to use certain types of hatching and why you might want to take this technique a step further.

Contour hatching

Rather than straight lines, contour hatching follows the required shape of the object or thing you are shading. In this case, I’ve used contour hatching on the giant snake. The snake is tubular in dimensions, so using the lines to follow the curvature of the snake’s body helps to create depth.

You can always draw more lines closer together the further away you are from the image’s light source, in this case the lantern held by the warrior. This helps to emphasise the illuminated areas of the snake in the sketch too.

Cross hatching

Here you add to the initial set of lines by crossing them with one or more sets of lines. The more sets of lines you add the darker that section of the sketch will appear. This is particularly useful if you want to include contrasting areas of shade in your sketch.

In the image above you can see this technique applied on parts of the warrior and the back of the snake’s head. Both are areas that the light from the lantern in the sketch wouldn’t reach, so need to appear darker.

Thanks

Thanks for reading. Before you go (and in case you’re wondering) I just want to give a shout out to the wonderfully supportive Old School TSR Gamers group on Facebook. They’ve always been very kind (and tolerant) of the artwork I’ve shared there. The sketch above is in the style of the “old school” ink sketches typical of early TSR products from the 70s and early 80s. These are the sketches I grew up with and they bring back many fond memories of gaming in my youth.