Didi

Hey thanks! I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about this sort of style, it’s basically just the same as crosshatching with a traditional pencil, except here with digital art I just used the pen tool in SAI so the lines don’t blend and they stand out more.

Essentially what you’re trying to do is express a plane with a series of lines, like this:

To express tone and shading, you can vary the density:

Thickness:

Darkness:

Or overlap lines (crosshatch):

This doesn’t mean that crosshatching always makes things darker, sometimes you can crosshatch lightly, it’ll just make the shading look finer:

So with a combination of line density, thickness, darkness, and overlap, you can create all sorts of different tones and textures depending on what you need for different parts of the picture:

To express turning faces, you can vary the direction or angle of your lines:

The rest is just a matter of deciding how you use those techniques to express the picture you want to draw, and that’s a matter of your own judgement and experience; it would be impossible to list every rule because there aren’t any rules. The stuff about thickness and crosshatching and density etc. I basically made up just now by looking back on my drawings and analysing the lines; I never actually consciously thought about those things when I drew them, so don’t treat them like commandments or something, play around with different lines and combinations to get a feel for yourself what works in what situations.

To illustrate that I’ll draw a picture of Sherlock and try to break down what I’m doing at each step:

Sorry my notes are a bit messy (I hope you can read my writing) but if anything I guess it reflects how messy my thought process is, I’m always adding things and changing things as I go along.

Always remember, you’re trying to use lines to represent planes, so even though you’re drawing in lines, you need to be looking at the reference and thinking in terms of planes, not lines. Also, make sure you keep your lines parallel so they don’t run into each other because that’ll make it look messy.

I think the best way to learn is always to try things yourself, so don’t just look at this tutorial, go play around with the lines yourself, whether you use my steps as a starting point or draw from a photo of your own, hopefully you’ll get a feel for how to use lines then. Also remember that you can go as detailed or as loose with your lines as you want, so long as you have the important shapes and facial features expressed.