How do I cross-hatch so it looks deliberate rather than messy?

Hatching is how you build tone in a medium that cannot be blended — pen and ink, hard pencil, etching, engraving. It is also how you build tone when you want the surface of the drawing to be visibly made of marks, which is a legitimate choice in graphite too. Done badly it reads as scribble. The difference is entirely in the discipline of the individual line.

Step by step

1. Decide the direction of your first layer from the form, not from your hand.The base layer should follow the surface it describes: running around a cylinder, along a plane, down a fold. Lines that run at a fixed angle regardless of what they cross flatten everything they touch.
2. Keep the spacing even and the lines separate.The whole effect depends on the eye averaging line and paper. Uneven gaps read as damage. Aim for gaps roughly equal to the line width in the light areas, tightening as it goes darker.
3. Lift at the end of each stroke rather than hooking back.The commonest fault is a zigzag, where the pen never leaves the paper and the return stroke shows. Every line is a separate mark with a start and an end.
4. Cross at a shallow angle, not a right angle.A second layer at 90 degrees produces a visible grid that reads as mesh rather than tone. Somewhere around 30 to 45 degrees breaks the pattern up. The third layer goes between the first two.
5. Darken by adding layers, not pressure.In ink you have no choice. In pencil, resist the urge to press — pressure closes the paper texture, produces shine, and gives you one dark you cannot go past. Three light layers reach further than one heavy one.
6. Change the length of the strokes as the tone changes.Short strokes in a small dark area, long confident ones over a broad half-tone. Long strokes in a small area force you to be timid; short strokes in a large one look chopped.
7. Try contour hatching on rounded forms.Curve the lines with the surface, as though a wire were laid across it. On a sphere the lines bend more sharply as they approach the edge. This does most of the work of describing form before any tone is even considered.
8. Leave clean paper for the highlights from the start.You cannot erase ink and you cannot easily reopen dense graphite hatching. Plan the lightest areas as untouched paper before you begin the first layer.

Tips

• Stippling — dots rather than lines — is the same principle and is far more forgiving of a wobbly hand. It is slow, but the tone is beautifully even.
• Turn the paper between layers rather than changing your hand angle. Your best stroke direction stays the same and the layers still cross.
• In pen, a technical pen of a single width forces you to build tone properly. A brush pen tempts you into filling areas in, which is a different technique entirely.
• Look at etchings and engravings rather than drawings if you want to understand what hatching can do. The whole language was developed for them.

Common mistakes

• Scribbling in a rough direction and calling it hatching — Scribble has no consistent direction, spacing or length, so it never averages into a clean tone at any viewing distance and it never describes a surface.
• Crossing at exactly 90 degrees on every layer — It produces a regular grid pattern that the eye locks onto, especially on the second layer, and the drawing reads as graph paper.
• Hatching the same direction everywhere — Every plane in the picture ends up with the same surface, so the drawing has tone but no form.

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