Additional Illustration Techniques
Beyond describing shapes with lines, there are several techniques available to a cartoonist to help create more believable images. Most of these techniques center around producing shades of gray — or the illusion of gray areas. Shading can create illustrations with considerable weight and depth.
Crosshatching
Through crosshatching, gray areas are created by fields of thin lines. Adding more thin lines over the first set — often running at a different angle — makes the gray darker. The eye reads these lines as a gray tone — even though they are really solid black lines. The final art that relies on crosshatching is still considered line art and has the flexibility and manageability that line art affords.
When crosshatching round objects, make the lines curve around the outside of the object. Drawing stiff, straight lines on a round object will rob them of their three-dimensionality and make them look flat. Curved crosshatching reinforces the depth of your drawing. Crosshatch lines can also vary in width but should never be heavier than the lines used to form the shape of the object you are shading.
Once you've built up your grays using this method, you can achieve some remarkable effects by going back into the illustration with white ink. You can produce reflected light and other effects with minimal effort. The resulting work is very polished and professional looking.
It's important to familiarize yourself with some printers' terms. Line art is art composed solely of solid black lines. Art that uses continuous gray tones is referred to as grayscale art. Grayscale images can be converted to strict black-and-white images by making them halftones — converting the grays to black dots. Line art is more versatile; grayscale art results in large computer files and halftones require special handling (discussed in Chapter 20).
Grafix manufactures a bristol board with the crosshatching already done. The lines are invisible, but they're there. You brush a special developer onto the parts you'd like shaded, and the lines appear. The board is expensive, but the effects are very sharp. The Grafix Web site is found at
The same illustration rendered in crosshatching, pointillism, ink wash, and Benday sheets
Pointillism
Another method for forming gray values without using actual gray tones is pointillism. The pointillism (or stippling) technique is similar to crosshatching, except you make dots instead of lines. The smaller and more spread out the dots, the lighter the resulting gray value. The larger and more closely packed the dots, the darker the resulting gray.
As with crosshatching, the dots should never overpower the lines that form the object being shaded. This method is rarely used because of the time-consuming, mind-numbing nature of tapping one's pen or marker on the paper repeatedly to slowly build up grays. However, since the end result is considered line art, the result is a small computer file size and a greater ability to resize, if necessary.
Ink Wash
A third method is to dilute India ink with water — working in what is known as a wash technique. Adjusting the water-to-ink ratio yields different shades of gray. Egg cartons make great containers for mixing ink and water. Paint the gray into your illustration with a brush. Also, several applications of the same shade “washed” over the same area repeatedly will result in a deeper tone. The final art must be either scanned as a grayscale or converted to a halftone.
Benday Sheets
Benday sheets are sheets of clear plastic paper with adhesive on one side and dots printed on the other. It comes in several shades and textures. A small piece is cut off and stuck to the surface of the illustration. Then an X-Acto knife is used to carefully cut it into the shape desired.
