Hatching

About

Hatching builds tone from rows of closely spaced parallel lines: the closer and heavier the lines, the darker the area. Cross-hatching lays a second set, or more, at an angle across the first, and lines can curve to follow the swell of a form.

It matters most wherever an artist cannot blend. Egg tempera painters of the 14th and 15th centuries modelled flesh with fine hatched strokes because the paint dried almost at once. Engravers depended on it: Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I (1514) achieves silvery greys and deep shadows from line alone. Leonardo da Vinci, who was left-handed, shaded with strokes slanting from upper left to lower right, a clue used in attributing his drawings. Vincent van Gogh's reed-pen drawings turn hatching into texture and energy, and in the 1970s Jasper Johns made whole abstract paintings from clusters of hatch marks.