Fudging and Squirling- Part 3

Steady Steady Wins the Race

nce you have established an accurate fine line drawing, laid the first careful layer of hatched toning in the darker shapes of your precise linework composition and made the ensuing necessary proportional adjustments you will really have something worthwhile going on taped to your drawing board. You can now continue the hatching and crosshatching journey (with a needle sharp pencil) as you introduce more and more different shades of grey (see article- “Shades of Grey”) to the various different abstract shapes your composition is made up of (figure 1). Don’t rush it and keep making the necessary proportional corrections (no matter how small) as you carefully introduce more and more tone to your layout with crosshatching. You will be surprised how dark in tone you can go without damaging, embossing, or calendaring the paper surface if you continually make sure your pencil tip is needle sharp and you keep as light a hand as possible during the entire course of the drawing project. If you don’t let your pencil become at all blunt (which will make you apply more pressure to the pencil tip to make refining lines stand out or to go darker in tone) it’s possible to lighten or almost completely remove quite dark areas of crosshatching quite late into the project. By the time the darkest of the greys and black are being