Vary your line

Drawings done entirely with a tentative, weak line tend to look like they’re drawn by nervous beginners. I don’t recommend it.
But a faint line does have its place. In fact, with a little experimentation, you’ll find that you become confident in using a mixture of strong and weak lines to achieve various effects.
The most useful of these will help you in your quest to represent depth. Firm lines are more prominent, more noticeable, jump out at the viewer - and therefore they are good for highlighting the foreground.
Meanwhile, weak lines can be used for details that are further away, since they make an object recede (another reason not to draw an entire picture with weak lines: do you want your whole image to shrink back from the viewer?). Think of a distant misty horizon, and you’ll see that this is so.
Your stronger lines can also be used to add emphasis to certain areas of your picture if you wish to - the important details. Also, you can use them in concert with your weaker line to show where dark and shade might lie, even in a simple unshaded line drawing: the firm line denotes the shaded side.
Aside from all this, it is pleasing to the eye to see a variety of lines in one picture, not one uniform line throughout, especially if the picture has ‘painterly’ rather than ‘illustrational’ pretensions.
Your task: find an object to draw, and try this out. If you like, practice a few strong, weak, and middle-sized lines first.
Posted: September 5th, 2007 under Confidence, Technique.
Comments: 2
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Hopefully this work, I added the green in photoshop.
Try it again…not sure what I am doing wrong here…
