the.com/crosshatch
proof that two lines crossing can fake a thousand shades of darkness
means To shade or fill an area with two sets of intersecting parallel lines, creating the illusion of depth or tone.
from A compound of "cross" (from Old English "cros," itself borrowed from Latin "crux," a stake or gibbet) and "hatch" — here the drawing sense, which came into English from Old French "hacher," to chop or cut, a cousin of the "hatchet." So to hatch a drawing was to score it with fine cuts of the pen; to crosshatch was to cut across those cuts. The verb "hatch" in this engraver's sense is centuries old, with "crosshatch" arriving later as artists named the technique of layering line over line.
- old master trick
- Dürer built entire shadows from pure parallel lines
- no gray needed
- denser crossing equals darker, ink stays pure black
- pen's revenge
- impossible to smudge, unlike pencil shading
- contour hatching
- curving lines wrap form, faking three dimensions flat
- comic backbone
- defines drama in countless black-and-white panels
rembrandt self-portrait 1659 — oil painting using dense parallel lines to create shadow and depth, housed in the uffizi gallery
scratchboard illustration — technique where artists scratch white lines into black clay surface, creating crosshatch effects in editorial and fine art