Let's Discuss Artistic Techniques!
Many drawing techniques are possible in the world pen and ink. Techniques are the foundation of traditional pen illustration they can almost be considered the materials for creating an image similar to how bricks can be materials for constructing a building. Each technique creates a unqiue visual feeling or texture for a drawing. Artists tend to use a combination of these techniques to produce various styles of art. These techniques can range from rendering reality to creating hyper stylized imagery. Experimenting with known techniques can help exercise your creatvity ability and improve your art. Ultimately through techniques artists can come to understand that a drawing when broken down is a vast collection of lines and shapes that when contrasted with a surface create an image. Some of the most well known and useful techniques are listed below.
| Pen Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Line Weight Manipulation | Line Weight is the lightness/darkness and thinness/thickness of a line. Manipulating the line weight of a drawing is a technique every artist utilized in almost all styles. |
| Hatching | Hatching creates value for a drawing. Hatching lines move in a linear or contoured fashion, usually without overlapping eachother. Dark values are created when lines are closer together and light values are created when lines are father apart. |
| Crosshatching | Crosshatching is essentially hatching with the addition of overlapping lines. |
| Scumbling | Scumbling is the technique of shading using irregular and random lines. Juat like hatching/crosshatching, the closer the lines are to each other the darker the value if the image. |
| Stippling | Stippling is creating form and shading through the use of dots. This can be one of the most time consuming but rewarding techniques. |
All of these techniques have endless artistic potential, the only limit to what you can create is your imagination. However it would be incorrect to assume that each technique could be properly mastered as soon as you applied them to paper. Each may take many, many hours and much discpline to master especially for realism art. But don't be discouraged, the best way to beging practicing is by creating a sphere with each technique. Rendering a sphere with each of the techniques is great first step because it gives you a good understanding of how variation of value can give an object form. Find a ball in your home or look up a refrence online and pay close attention how light interacts with the object, draw lines farther apart where light is hitting the object and closer together where light is absent. Below is a Youtube video demonstrating the creation of some techniques listed above on this page to give you a better understanding of how they are put into practice.