For this lesson, you will need some good quality drawing paper, and a few sharp colored pencils, including a colorless blender if you have one. Practice adjusting the amount of pressure that you apply to the pencil as you shade to precisely control the amount of color you lay down. On the left is an area of side-shaded pencil, and on the right is some tip-shaded colored pencil. The paper grain in the side-shaded area is much more obvious, appearing coarser and more open. The tonal range is also more limited. When shading with the tip of a sharp pencil, you can achieve a much richer, denser layer of color. The grain appears finer and the pencil tip is able to get right into the paper grain, and you can create a broader tonal range. This doesn’t mean that shading with the side of the pencil is wrong - it can be a useful technique for sketching when you want soft, grainy and even-toned shading. For best results, keep your pencil sharp. Rapid, regular, evenly spaced lines are drawn, leaving a little white paper or underlying color showing. Close-up like this they look pretty irregular, but when you use hatching in a drawing, the slight variations don’t look so dramatic. It does take some practice to get them even though! It’s a good idea to practice on some spare paper first, so you get your hand moving the right way before applying pencil to your work. Hatching can be done so that the lines begin and end very precisely, or you can vary the lineweight, lifting the pencil to create a graded effect. You can also create interesting textured effects by adding the second layer at just a slight angle, or by layering sections in at random angles. Again, these examples are zoomed in so that you can see the lines and effects clearly. As always, practice makes perfect with crosshatching. Experiment with lineweight (how hard you press the pencil), spacing, sharpness and color. See how it looks when you use just a couple of layers, compared to multiple layers. Experiment with using the light or dark tones first. By trying things out on spare paper (a failed drawing on good paper is ideal for this), you’ll have the confidence to use these more interesting techniques in your final work. You can also use a more ‘concave’ scumble technique to create textures. Using a sort of figure-eight or ‘daisy’ shaped scribble and spidery lines, rather than a round circle, creating random dark patches and a more organic looking surface.
