Trying to influence the darkness of the color with different hatching techniques.

One of my biggest problems in drawing with color pencil has been my inability to control the darkness of a color.
For this practice drawing I decided to see what I could do to get a color darker or lighter.

I thought that both the number of times you cross hatch and the amount of pressure you put on the pencil might have an influence on the color.
I was only partly right.
The number of times you cross hatch does have an influence on the darkness of the square.
Putting more pressure on the pencil didn’t have much influence on the color of the line.
(Actually this isn’t completely true. If you put a lot of pressure on a pencil you do get a darker line. A problem arises when you start drawing with softer, more expensive pencils that contain more pigment. With these pencils your point will break if you use to much pressure.)

A better technique to get a darker line is to slowly rotate the pencil in your hand while your drawing. The business end of a pencil wears down while you’re drawing. By rotating the pencil you make sure you always have a sharp edge on the paper.
Whether this influences the color of the square depends on your hatching skill. If the lines are too far apart the overall picture will still seem very light.
Click the picture and go to the original size and you can see the individual lines both in the dark blue and the dark yellow square.

Hatching techniques

I also tried the hatching technique children usual use. Starting in a corner or at some arbitrary point and radiating out: First coloring the little bit where I started and then going on with a progressively larger space until whole the square is colored. (Lower right blue square and the brown square).
I’m not completely sure which I like better. I assume it has a lot to do with what you’re drawing. When drawing a kitchen cupboard traditional cross hatching would probably look better, but when drawing a tree seeing the direction of the pencil strokes could be very nice.

For the pink square I tried what would happen if I blended the color using a piece of kitchen paper. Since the piece of paper was far larger then the square the color bled over the edge. In my next drawing I’m going to try to use this effect.