Hatching with Frederick Goltzius

Hendrick Goltzius was a German-born Dutch printmaker, draftsman, and painter. He was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, noted for his sophisticated technique and the "exuberance" of his compositions. According to A, Hyatt Mayor, Goltzius was the last professional engraver who drew with the authority of a good painter, and the last who invented many pictures for others to copy".

According to Samuel van Hoogstraten, a student and biographer of Rembrandt, it was the master himself that encouraged his students to copy Goltzius engravings as a way to learn how to hatch.

Hatching with Robert Crumb

Illustrated here are various styles of hatching. Some are combinations of hatching techniques distributed to create contrasting effects. In the work of Robert Crumb, for example, the artist hatches a background with perpendicular fine cross hatching and contrasts this with and area of contour hatching, implying different textures. The masterful use of the contrasting hatching textures can create great luminosity and imply color.

Hatching Topologies for the Artist

A methodology of drawing that emerged over the years as a way to describe form is known as hatching. Hatching is used as a way to organize lines to better communicate the concept of form to the viewer. Hatching is a kind of drawing language, comprised of groups of lines of varying lengths, that often appear as a series of parallel lines which describe the topology of the form in space. Hatching can also be a pattern of shapes that through proximity to one another create the illusion of light on an object- commonly referred to as the light model. All forms of hatching rely on patterns of alignment and orientation to describe how form reflects light thereby creating in the viewer's brain information about how that object occupies space. In this regard, hatching is very much like the matrix of polygons that describe a volume in CAD space, as demonstrated in previous posts.

As a primer, one might consider that there are six types of Hatching modalities.

Contour Hatching

Parallel Hatching

Cross Hatching

Fine Cross Hatching 

Tick Hatching

Basket Hatching

Topological strategies of Antony Gormley

These visual metaphors help us to visualize the volume of a figure by creating a virtual manikin in space. We are then able to transduce the visual information into a drawing or painting with a greater sense of that figure's occupancy of space. Consequently, the artist is then less dependent on measuring the contours of the image on the canvas because they can "project" a holographic facsimile of the volume with their visualization skills. 

One example of this is the work of Antony Gormley. The British sculptor fills the volumes of his figures with various forms that range from cubes to tangled wires, to colossal steel grids.Gormley can "see" the human form in space- he senses it's occupancy and displacement. This gives him free reign to experiment with all kinds of materials with which to describe these volumes.