Pen and Ink Cross Hatching Exercises

hey welcome back everyone rob here from ram studio comics so in today's video i'm just going to do some scribbling really i'm just going to basically take some of these different pens that i like to use and make some different marks and talk about why i think that's a good idea you know experimentation wise and and basically trying to figure out what pens you like and kind of the process i take i just created a new class by the way and i'll make sure it's linked in the description box below and i cover some traditional inking techniques one of which is this this thing this and then we even do some drapery uh just to cover some things but then i thought well i should probably share something on the channel here and talk about you know just some of the warm-up activities that i'll do and you know just different i don't know if you want to call them exercises i guess they could be that but it's just something i just randomly do with any pen that i start working with so i've got my go-to pens which are going to be you know things like the microns i like this one zebra felt tip i use a couple brush pens one of which is a tombow tombau and then also a pentel brush pen um but they all have different things that i i tend to use within my work so for me like when i grab one of these microns i'm typically going to render some cross hatching something like this okay and you can really do everything with one pen if you wanted to but i really don't use them that way in fact whenever i'm sitting here just kind of doodling and making marks by the way this is the old three i just do a couple things i try to focus on what i can generate line wise uh you know and control and size okay so i'm looking at the size of these lines i'm thinking about okay what what kind of control do i have at this size for this type of line making the reason why it's so important is like you're going to draw these different panels right you're not always working on pin-ups where you're doing these big open areas and you got to see what you can attain in a specific area a smaller area or larger area so you're basically just kind of studying that and then you're trying to create different patterns uh different you know maybe the same thing like these are the same but this has a slight curve and then i might go over here and say okay what can i get if i do a downward pull and then i kind of stagger the line a little bit let me check my screen here make sure i'm not in the way of and my hand always gets in the way especially when i'm using a more um a shorter pen anyways my hand gets right over the top of it just the way that i tend to draw and i don't want to move the camera because then it distorts it but uh you guys can tell me what you think of that is my hand in the way is that annoying uh but yeah so like just kind of staggering or stuttering the line a little bit that can be great for certain effects right and it's easy to do that's would be easier right because you're basically emulating like you have an unsteady hand in a sense and and you want that you want that variation i think i think it's really important to play around with all the different variables you can to to get a nice variety so that's that's what i would generate with a micron those types of lines okay so anything that's a bit cleaner i'm gonna go for that you know something that's a little bit more loose but not a ton it's still pretty clean pretty tight is this tombow fudenosuki i don't know what that says but you know you can see it there hopefully and i'll make sure to list these in the description box below for you but what's nice about this one is it's easier to get a bigger uh tapered line so a nice earth larger thick to thin there's still a lot of control here i really like these uh these brush pens right here uh this and the zebra one i'll show you in a minute but i think i might like this one better tell you the truth but but again this is a little bit uh subjective to whatever size you're working at so things i like to practice are how close i can get the lines together and control that so i'm paying attention to that as i do this how much i can control a tapered line and get to a nice point so there's some of them i can get a nice heavy start to it really easily right but then if i can't get the point i want i might have to come back with a different pen to to do that and so you know it's not out of the uh the realm of uh possibilities or whatever but i like when i can get all my rendering out with that one pin at least a specific type of rendering and that's what i'd be doing here another thing is is you want to practice also bringing these together in different ways okay so one way is you can just add this thicker little piece to the back it almost creates another pattern right these are all in my mind these are all just patterns that you're creating yeah see i don't like that but i it's i need to at least test it to see if i like it and i might even try another little pattern like this i do all sorts of weird little things when i'm inking my artwork because those patterns are neat they they introduce another level of detail to the work so one way to think about think of it as just gradients right so for instance uh let me go back to let me see if this o1 i i gotta be careful because sometimes these old ones dry out and i got them sitting by my work area and i need to just toss and go on to the next one i buy these suckers by the box because of this no this one's good okay um but yeah so basically you want to think about the different gradients you can create with these okay this is a perfect example because you can generate these nice little lines in succession let me do it up here actually so i'll create these very tight little lines probably could have went tighter than that but and see it's that's not even a gradient i'm sorry that's just a tone that's like a it's almost reminds me of like zipatone or something you know but it's just a tone and then when you go in the other direction let's say maybe go like this all right there's another tone and you could go diagonally and there's another one so this is kind of a a real clean way to get that gradation you know one two three you know so that's one way to do it there's lots of ways to do it but this is something that i like to use this in comparison or in contrast i should say to these other effects uh the more the better you know to me i feel like if you got a lot of these different things going on for background effects and for textures you can you know you can tell a better story you can really control your focus focal points really well you can just make things look more interesting you know if you have this really neat uh style of rendering but you do it everywhere it loses its luster it becomes uh almost boring this is another one i like to use for backgrounds this is kind of just something you'll see it's it's pretty popular right i'm sure you've seen this effect but it's easy to do you just basically go around in different angles all i'm doing i might pick no lines going this right way i might go this way it's pretty simple it's actually kind of peaceful too something about this part right here i could really zone out and just do this it's almost like meditation or something but i'm sure all art should be thought of as meditation but for me it's not some parts of it are actually kind of stressful but it's all worth it it's all it's all awesome in the end but see that just another little you know quick easy texture you can go back and play with this as well you could uh thicken up some of the lines here and there i like to just leave it like that tell you the truth now another one that i like or another thing i think you should practice when doing this is to block in an area let's say something like this i'm going to use this uh n15 i believe it is tombow tombow somebody tell me how that's pronounced type it in the in the box below type it how it sounds okay so something like this all right just it doesn't have to be pretty whatever just blocking in some shadow and then practice rendering out from there okay so i'll take this actually let's take the zebra one so that's this one i believe yep right there you see that my lighting's bad in there zebra i don't know what's the the numbers on this thing yeah i got my lights set up funny sorry folks again i'll link in the description box below but now try to take the uh the bulk of the shadow and render it out and when doing this i think it's important to try to blend it in a way where you don't see the initial um well it's hard to explain you don't see the initial rectangle in between these so if i let me no i don't want to do it because i'll mess up the effect you want to make sure that the taper goes so thick that it turns into a point in the negative see the white is basically a point so i think it's really important to practice is i see a lot of people render and it looks pretty good but then they leave these big gaps in between their lines kind of everywhere okay and and in some areas it's okay to do that like i'm saying about contrast and comparison there's definitely areas you do want to do that that's okay it's not like there's a right or wrong way to do this stuff but you can get a really nice gradient or a really nice transition if you focus on bringing these together a little more uh to me that's what this is supposed to do your your your lines are supposed to soften up the edge of the uh the shadow and blend some of it anyway some of it should be not all of it you know what i'll do i'll do it by comparison so up here we've got this tighter and i can go back in and keep making sure all these negative white little areas turn into points you know that's the kind of taper i'm looking for but say i do the same type of line exact same line but i space it out it's just a different look okay i'll go i'll space it out further as i go this way and this is this is really what i'm talking about right here so to me this isn't this isn't really what i would want to see in my work this portion it just has a totally different look than what we see up here this to me looks like more of a transition and then once i if i do i almost don't need to cross hatches but say i did i also like to mix up the way that i cross hatch with with another pen so i could take the o1 and go this way with it and i think it's nice to have that that variety that variation in the the lines i feel like they don't um i feel like it reads better when you make sure to use a different thickness of line there that might just be me but again i like to use all these pens together um now let's see another way we could do this is we could try to cross hatch now at a slight angle like this you'll see this effect a lot yeah i don't like that no i'm not digging it but yeah again i would blend all that to where the gaps aren't so significant let's just try some tighter line work like this yeah but the main thing is just experimenting a lot like even right here let's just do some stippling another one that's real important to practice and i will sit here and just doodle all day long i'm a doodler folks that's what i do i doodle but that's how you're going to find your your effects you know you're going to sit here and mess around with these different pens oh yeah let me show you what i like so this is a pentel brush pen and what i like about these it's got a good quality for the tip of the brush and you can just kind of make some neat little uh textures with this not cool looking now what's going to happen generally is you're going to need better hand control i think to work with this one it's great for fills this and that n15 i showed you great for fills really speeds up that part of the process but you can get all sorts of neat little textures but just you know the very tip of it like that it's also really nice for um energy effects so i'm just gonna you know kind of move that brush tip back and forth and almost think like a perspective line you know the direction anyways continuity that way and space it out do some more over here maybe some smaller ones by comparison hopefully you see you can get a really neat kind of energy to that and really quick that's one of my favorite things about a brush pen the speed is just uh hard to beat yeah it's kind of addicting i just want to sit here and fill up the whole page with this effect but yeah it's fun to do um and you just keep building on it too another thing another thing i want to stress is that don't be afraid to mess up of course you're gonna mess up and that's when you're gonna bust out your white out and you're gonna fix things and you're gonna figure things out and you're gonna make it sometimes better um you know great white out is this presto stuff uh the reason why i like this stuff the most well sorry i shook that right by the mic that was probably offensive um the reason why i like this stuff the most is because it's it's very opaque so you can really glob it down and it's solid and then it's workable you can go back through and ink over this and and make it look uh just like you're inking over bristol board so yeah big fan of this stuff i wish it was a finer point but it seems like the trade-off is when you have a finer point that you basically don't get the uh the opaqueness that you need um so let me see let me go back to the tombow fine point the food and suka that i can't say and so i did these other lines right here and that's another one that i think is a good idea to practice so you know this is more of a clean with a slight curve but then i'm again i'm trying to bring those to more of a point i'm going to practice that some more over here and i just wanted to explain too like i think a lot of people wonder you know about the hand mechanics right so what i'm doing is i'm really placing the the weight on my um the heel of my you know hand is just planted right uh that's that's how i get the control and then i'm just rotating off that pivot point uh now that works for smaller tighter areas and i generally can get pretty good control but it also hinders me from doing longer sweeping passes so for instance again this is more detail work this is something in a tighter area that i'm going to do this in because i'm not going to have the kind of control i would need to go across the page now i can i can try that i should try that i should practice uh so say i needed a line to go from this point to this point it's a lot bigger area that i'm gonna have to pull a lot you know longer stroke right so what i have to do there is kind of create the line over a series of strokes okay at least the way that i would do it the way that i found for it to work for me and then i would beef up the weight back here i would have that initial line that almost becomes a sort of ruler for me and then i would do that again and i can tell you right now that the amount of effort that i'm having to put into that line makes me not want to use this pen so again this is where testing these tools are going to tell you what they're good for for me that's too much work for that line it's kind of weird i thought it would uh come out better now i'm going to try the zebra one again see if that's any different it could be sometimes it's just the pens drying up a little bit but now it's it's really just that this is more of a detail brush and pen so i'm going to try the uh the pentel brush pen now i know right off the bat i'm not going to have the amount of control that i'm used to with a felt tip but it's easier to get that ink down and it might just mean that i need to dedicate more time to using this brush pen but again i'm probably not going to get the same control i'm after but speed is a is a big factor as well and i think it still looks good it's just not i see a couple little bumps where i didn't mean for them to to be i might even have to go back with a little bit of white out and try a different effect with this but if i need a gradient if i need some cross hatching in this big of an area then i need what i need right i'm going to have to go for it and i i think that really i just need to spend more time using a brush when i did the arrow and assault comics back in the day i did it all i inked it all with the brush pens i can't even find those brush pens that i used to get they were they were awesome i got them from like a uh we call it architecture uh design studio or you know the the supplies for architecture drafting supplies i guess drafting company i don't know but anyways they were great they were local i was able to find them and uh i realized i could get a good line with them i'll tell you the truth that's actually why i picked up this one i thought this was it looked just like this and a lot you know pretty close so i thought that's what this one was the tombow but it's not uh like i said i can't couldn't find them but what i'm getting at is that's one of the ones i first started to feel really comfortable with uh was using a um you know brush pen from from them from that uh supplier all right so at any rate we'll bring this one to a close i hope you've enjoyed today's video i'd love to know what you think and more content on the way as always keep drawing keep having fun and bye for now you

Channel: Robert Marzullo

Views: 156,621

Keywords: pen and ink, inking tutorial, line art, cross hatching, exercises, inking your art, how to ink, how to crosshatch, shading, textures, rendering, effects, comics, comic art, traditional art, techniques, video tutorial

Id: D8yw1ov3hjI

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020