This was a practice digital portrait to develop my contour hatching skills.
About contour hatching
Contour hatching is made up of lines that follow the form of a subject to suggest volume and shape. As I often find myself reverting to cross hatching it’s a skill I definitely need to work on.
If you want to know more about hatching, August Lamm is a master at it. For a super-clear demonstration of what it means to hatch contours, see her demonstration video on her Twitter feed.
Adapting to a different way of creating
I’m still struggling to mentally adapt to drawing digitally. For a long time, I avoided using digital tools much as I feared becoming over-reliant on them to draw.
I’m not really interested in digital art to take shortcuts or ‘fake’ a piece of art. My drawing skills aren’t developed enough for me to stop practicing so I can’t afford the distraction!
By the way – I’m not belittling artists that make use of the full range of creative tools in Procreate. I’ve long admired some of the art they create (especially environmental concept art). I really look forward to playing with them but I really need to focus on the fundamentals before I do.
Personally, I love drawing line-art with fountain pens and fineliners.
I’ve drawn with ballpoints since I was a child. Along the way, I’ve worked to improve my drawing technique and developed a real love for drawing in pen and ink.
Right now, I’m trying to hone my observation and fine motor skills by drawing more. In the future, I might only have a napkin and ballpoint pen but that should still be enough to create great art! 🙂
This is why I’m forcing myself to draw on the iPad using a minimalist mindset. I’m imagining that I’m drawing on paper with just a fountain pen or a couple of fineliners. Perhaps, one day I’ll explore the hundreds of brushes in the Procreate toolset but for now, I need to focus on the basics.
About this drawing
This is a drawing based on a photograph I found on the Sktchy/Museum app. For this session, I decided to target my contour hatching skills, as if I was using a narrow-gauge fineliner (around 0.1 – 0.2mm). The last digital portrait I drew used quite a broad pen size so this was going to be a very different exercise.
The dark hair and t-shirt in my reference image meant that it was quite challenging to stick to the fine brush that I’d selected. The large dark areas took an awful lot of hatching to achieve anywhere near the depth of tone required. I had to exercise some strict self-control to avoid my hatching becoming sloppy and haphazard (or to use a wider brush).
The whole drawing took about two hours to complete. I guess the way that I draw digitally, it’s neither a cheat or a shortcut! 😅 It was quite an exercise in observation, patience and self-restraint!
Summary
| Application | Procreate v5 |
| Tools / Hardware | Apple Pencil 2 on an 2021 iPad |
| Time Taken | ~2 hours |
| Dimensions (@300dpi) | 300mm x 300mm (3550 x 3550 pixels) |