Pen and Ink Cross Hatching Masters Edition

I've been asked to do a series of illustrations on spiritual themes, and I've decided to do them in a storytelling style. This is one of my pencil sketches, which wasn't quite large enough when I finished it, so I scanned it in my computer and printed it off a little bit larger. And I've chosen to do the illustrations in pen and ink on vellum. The reason is partly, of course, so that I can trace them, but with a light table I could have traced it on opaque paper, more because it gives me just the texture that I need to do my cross-hatching. I'm going to be using the old-fashioned pen and ink, a larger quill pen to do the outline, and a tiny crow quill pen to do the cross-hatching. Let me show you a couple of finished illustrations that I've already done, this one showing the concept of hope, which if you look carefully you'll see hope there in the waves, and this one being on the concept of faith. Here's the kind of cross-hatching I'm going to end up with. It's quite fine, quite detailed, takes a lot of time, and creates this beautiful texture with hours of work. Before I get started, I'm going to put out a piece of the same vellum that I'm going to be drawing on over here to the side that I can practice making sure that the pen is functioning just the way I want it to. You'll see even that I'm turning the pen upside down to get different widths of line. That's why I'm not using a rapidograph or a technical pen for this illustration, because I want the freedom of doing thick and thin lines, as you see me doing there. So I have finished the first layer of cross-hatching, all the lines going in the same diagonal direction, covering a large portion of the illustration. The second layer will go in the opposite direction and cover slightly less area than the first. So the second phase of my cross-hatching is finished. The first phase went at one angle, as you can see, and then the second went at the opposite angle. Now the third layer of cross-hatching is going to go at a 45-degree angle, or horizontal. So here's a section of the illustration that has cross-hatching going in three different directions. The next cross-hatching I'm going to do will be essentially a vertical, and that will be my fourth layer of cross-hatching. I've decided to switch over at this point to a rapidograph pen. This is a triple-aught, I think, 3-0 rapidograph pen, and I'm doing that even though the lines are slightly heavier than the pen that I have been using. It's okay, because with each layer of cross-hatching, the impact, or the significance, the darkening effect of each layer gets diminished. So it's okay for the lines at this point to start getting just a little bit heavier. Here now, if you will, is another form of cross-hatching that I would call scribble cross-hatching. If there's an area in the drawing that I want to have a particular texture, I'll just move my pen, as you see me doing here, in a squiggly pattern. These are supposed to be roots hanging down from the overhang above, and you know what roots are like. They're all a tangled mass. So I think it'll look a little bit more like roots if I do this random kind of cross-hatching. Let me take just a minute and explain something here. I think you're understanding this, but I want to be as clear as I can. Cross-hatching has a direction, or a grain. The first layer of cross-hatching, if the grain goes this way, then the second layer of cross-hatching I will do at a 90 degree angle to that. Then, at least theoretically, the third layer of cross-hatching will go at a 45 to that, and then the next fourth layer of cross-hatching will go at a 90 degree to that last one. So now I have lines going in four different directions. Does that make sense? Once you're done with the fourth layer, however, it gets a little bit complicated. Either you have to try to calculate the distance between these two angles and do something like this, which I do sometimes, but honestly what usually happens is that in the course of doing four layers of cross-hatching, one or the other will get slightly off. They won't all be perfect like this. So there'll be, as I look at it very closely, there'll be one angle that is just a little bit more open. It has more open spaces, and that's what I'll fill in. So that's what I'm about to do here. And finally, the last layer of cross-hatching in this darkest or these darkest areas, I've thrown my neat, orderly, careful strokes to the wind, and I basically just come in here and scribble away, just the way if you were a child doing a coloring book and coloring in the lines, you would just scribble back and forth to get the color as dark as you want it.