Mark Making and Tone Mark Making Techniques – Hatching and Stippling

Various hatching and stippling marks, made inside 5 to 10 cm squares, were required for this exercise.

I began by experimenting with charcoal. As it’s such a soft and smudgy medium, encouraging large marks, I decided to first draw the marks on a larger piece of paper, then cut them into small squares and paste them into my sketchbook. This in itself seemed to work out well in charcoal. Stippling is a technique which I tend to find tedious and slow using finer mediums, so I liked being able to cover a large area relatively fast. Thick felt tip pen was the only other medium I liked using for stippling, again for fast covering ability.

It was more difficult when it came to trying out hatching and crosshatching with charcoal, especially with fine detail. I found this only possible using a very thin stick, or if I made a conscious effort to separate the lines well when using the medium and thicker kind on the side, or flat side of the end. Certainly, fine definition was much easier using a hard pencil, a well sharpened softer pencil, ballpoint and fine marker pens and to some extent, the coloured pencils.

One interesting effect I discovered was to first make hatched indentations in the paper using the dry nib of a bamboo stick, then shade over the top with a soft pencil on the side of the tip, leaving the paper white
where the indentations were made.

What I found most enjoyable of all was experimenting with variations requiring a more spontaneous and loose approach. A feather quill, using either end seems to lend itself well to this, as well as thick dip pens and hollow homemade pens such as teasel, course grass stick and bamboo.

Manipulating the drawing tool in different ways also of course had a big effect on the kind of results possible.