It was a tutor recommendation to look up etchings by Dutch painter and printmaker Rembrandt van Rijn to study his hatching and crosshatching technique. The suggestion was related to the somewhat underdeveloped hatching techniques I employed in my sketchbook work. During Part 2 of the course I hardly drew at all, but I think I did take on board tutor comments to be more attentive to the angle at which I do my crosshatching lines and avoid 90 angles because they tend to look awkward.

Reconsidering my sketches, in particular the interior view made with ball pen, I realized that the hatching somehow worked against the three-dimensionality of the object, for example the wooden parts of the armchair. Oftentimes the hatching is too rough and disturbs the visual effect rather than supporting the composition. So there’s definitely scope for improvement.

When I first looked at Rembrandt’s etchings, I was a bit irritated because their tones were so subtle and no linework was visible. I thought this may have been a consequence of the printmaking technique or due to low resolution images that did not reproduce well enough to make the hatching appear. But then I found several prints where the hatching lines were clearly visible. Sometimes, I found the hatching quite chaotic and almost as disturbing as my own, for example “The Entombment” (left). In other prints, the hatching was extremely subtle and in perfect harmony with the image, as in the portrait of Jan Lutma (right).

I learned that Rembrandt was the printmaker who used tinted plates to create tonal effects in addition to hatching and cross hatching. The Negresse print is an excellent example for this. The overall effect is completely different to earlier, pure etchings like the portrait of the artist’s mother.

Now I don’t think I could lean on the technique for linoprinting, but it might be inspirational for etching later on. The aspect to take away for now is try to become more sensitive to how I create tone when using a linear drawing medium. I recently made a little tonal study in my sketchbook with Jet black pencil. It was done with hatching and cross hatching. The technique worked well for the middle and dark tones, but not for the light tones. When I try to create light tones with a single hatching layer, the lines are very prominent. Maybe it would have worked better with a mixture of hard, medium and soft pencil, with hard pencils for cross-hatching the lighter tones.

References

Thematic essay with images at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rembp/hd_rembp.htm#thumbnails