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Those who wish to create great line drawings should have a good armoury of shading techniques up their sleeves (just to mix a few metaphors there).

I don’t know about you, but I always got a bit bored by those exercises that art teachers make you do in the early lessons. Before you’re allowed to actually draw with anything, you’re supposed to explore the different marks your chosen medium can make.

Maybe if I’d thought a bit harder about the reasons behind it, I’d have been more enthusiastic. The truth is that the more different marks you can make, the more tools you have at your disposal in your attempts to represent your subject. Well, I’ve always been a ‘jump right in’ sort of person, much to my detriment. I never read the manual, and I’m not too likely to spend half an hour exploring the marks a pen can make, either.

However, over the years, I’ve just kind of picked up a few favourite shading techniques. You can see a few of them above: plain black, diagonal lines, vertical lines (spaced to different widths) and, my favourite, little dots. Not represented here is the classic choice of cross-hatching.

I won’t ask you to spend your time mark-making, unless the idea particularly grabs you, but if you’re impatient like me, you might try a line-drawing incorporating a few of these techniques.