A few drawings to practice hashing.
Just like I expected yesterday I’m starting to get some idea about what it is that I want to accomplish by practicing hashing.
I’ve decided to start out with practicing with gray pencil. For one thing because gray pencils are cheaper than color pencils but mostly because I also want to be able to draw with gray pencil. As I look at drawing by other artist I get the impression that hashing and cross hashing are more important techniques with gray pencil then with color pencil.
For the first run I started out with at random putting some hashes (is this a word?) on paper. It didn’t feel that difficult.
Gray scale hashing 1
After filling a large part of the paper I thought that it might be nice to draw a grid and fill that with hashed lines.
Gray scale hashing 2
This turned out to be a little more of a challenge. It’s quite difficult to stay within the lines.
I tried to hash half a square and then the other half but run into to problem I have had earlier. The two half hashes tend to overlap which means that there is a part in the middle that is darker then the rest. (Line 2 row 4.)
The only solution seems to be to work with very long lines. But axectly the right length. Not so long that you over shoot the outer line and not so short that white shows.
For the corner squares I didn’t want to hash. The problem with hashing at the edge of the paper is that you overshoot the edge and get stuck on your way back.
Instead I wanted to draw parallel lines but that caused it’s own problems.
There are several techniques you can use to draw short straight lines but none seem to have a very good result.
One option is to rest your wrist on the table and use your fingers to guide the pencil. But if I do that I get a wobbly line.
The other possibility is drawing from the shoulder. But then there are also two possibilities that don’t work very good. You could draw very slow but if you do the line tends to get slightly rounded instead of straight. Or you could draw a lot faster but then you tend to overshoot.
(Which isn’t a problem when you are drawing at the edge of the paper but usually that won’t be the case.)
Clearly I’ll have to do some more practicing of both the hashing as the drawing of parallel lines.
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