Hatching, you either love it or hate it as an artist. For some people, it can serve as a soothing doodle technique or become their secret weapon to a beautiful comic or manga page. What exactly is hatching?
Hatching is a drawing technique using lines or linear strokes to create value and texture throughout an image. They don't always have to be straight lines, and they don't always have to be neat and consistent either. There are multiple types of hatching, each providing their own texture that you can add. In comics and manga, it is used both as a shading technique and a texturing one. It's really very versatile!
With that out of the way, let's start practicing!
Hatching 101: The Basics
The most basic form of hatching are lines that do not cross and are usually mostly parallel to each other. They don't have to be perfect, but the basic idea is that they run in the same direction. This can be used for a wide variety of purposes in art, including value (shading) or effects.
In this sample, "Thor 600 Splash page by Olivier Coipel", hatching is used all over, however let's focus on the upper left corner first. Those vertical lines are not 100% parallel, but very close to it. These help emphasize the vertical motion of pounding the walking staff on the ground, as well as the resulting transformation into Thor. On the right-hand side, I did a little bit of hatching to show that hatching can look clean and neat, even if the lines are 100% parallel or the lines break up.
You can even use hatching in combination with black fills to create a "feathering" effect, a sort of gradient between the black and white spaces. The samples above are from TheGreatShono on Tumblr.
Usually in hatching, we think of it having to be the same thickness of line, or same width apart. There is a time and place for "messy" hatching and a time for very clean hatching. The trick to using hatching well is knowing when to be neat and when not being neat will actually get you a better result. We can change the frequency (closeness of the lines) and density (thickness of the lines) to create all kinds of effects in hatching!
Speaking of effects, did you know you can also use Hatching for motion effects. Speedlines are one form of this and manga is especially famous for this.
I cannot possibly talk about hatching and manga without bringing up Berserk (I'll be bringing it up a few times). Berserk is infamous for its line work, which contains a large variety of hatching. A, B, and C are all standard linear hatching.
- A: Rain is usually drawn in vertical lines. In this particular case, it's a slight mix of contour hatching and standard linear hatching.
- B: Guts himself is shaded in a mix of hatching and cross hatching. Kentaro Miura, the mangaka, drew the lines to go the same angle as the plane of Guts' face, a very typical choice in hatching. You can really see this where his jaw meets his neck.
- C: Guts' sword is being hit by the rain and Miura has decided to use the angle of the rain to match the contour of the sword (or it's a coincidence that worked out perfectly). This does two things, it helps emphasize the flow of motion in this panel, and helps give the effect of the sword moving through the rain.
- D: This is a type of hatching that occurs all over comics and manga, and we'll talk about this next! I actually mentioned it above, and it's called "Contour hatching".
Contour Hatching
Contour hatching follows the contour of an object, its shape, its planes that form the object. It's a great way to help show the surface direction of an object and give it depth. A lot of hatching follows this type. It's also very helpful for hair and wrinkles, both in clothes and faces.
Cross Hatching
Famous for being extra difficult, Cross hatching takes many forms and can take a LOT of practice. Cross-hatching requires a steady hand, or at least someone who knows how to control it well. Both comics and manga use this liberally.
Take note in that cross-hatching and contour hatching usually go together when it is used to shade a subject. Yusuke Murata's One Punch Man is a fantastic example of hatching and cross-hatching and I strongly recommend it as a sample set of art to look at for this topic.
Cross-hatching comes in a wide variety of looks and can also be used for backgrounds with these types.
Other Types
There are really an infinite number of ways that you can use lines to hatch and cross-hatch. Here are two other examples of possibilities: scribble and patch hatching. When it comes to patch hatching, this is used a lot in manga as a background or texture fill. I personally have never seen scribble hatching used, but I would suppose it depends on the texture you are aiming for. Wool, matted hair on a wild beast, or maybe dirt and rocks and other naturally rough surfaces could be possible examples of where this might be used. Be creative with it!
If you need some more samples of any type of hatching, I would strongly suggest reading your favorite comics or manga and taking notes. I would also suggest looking online for inks of your favorite works without any screentones or colors to get a better look at what it looks like. You can also watch a lot of drawing videos on YouTube demonstrating this technique.
You can easily practice this on your own on paper or your favorite drawing software. I would recommend a drawing tablet or on paper. However, you can also use customized brushes or even screentones to add in some hatching. We'll cover how screentones work in a later episode though!
As always, here are some more resources for you! Good luck!
- Hatching and Cross Hatching by The Virtual Instructor (this contains a video demo!)
- Hatching and Cross Hatching Technique by John Muir Laws
- How to Cross Hatch for Comics by Proko (YouTube Video)
- Kakeami: Manga Cross Hatching Exercise (YouTube Video)
Thank you for reading! We'll see you next time!
~ArtCrumbs and the GlobalComix Team