The Hatching Game

2/26/19 Green Lake neighborhood

Still sunny (which we are grateful for here in typically gray Seattle), the days have been cold and bitterly windy. Eager to take advantage of the sunshine, I was driving around the Green Lake neighborhood, trying to find things I could sketch from my mobile studio. I remembered a parking lot that faces a residential block on one side. If I can get a spot on that side, I have several cute houses to choose from, like this Tudor.

I need to up my hatching game, and this house was a good opportunity. I don’t have a problem with small areas of heavy hatching, but when I have a large area, like the side of the house, I start to get impatient and messy, and I don’t like that look. It’s ironic that I seem to have a fair amount of patience when applying layers of colored pencil, but I lose patience with a ballpoint pen.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve recently been using a Stillman & Birn Zeta sketchbook as my daily-carry. My default for a subject like this house would have been colored pencils, but with that smooth Zeta book in my hand, I found myself reaching for a ballpoint instead. Toothy Canson XL watercolor paper, my typical everyday-carry, would never be my choice with ballpoint, so the Zeta paper is opening more options. Perhaps it’s not as much of a compromise as I had thought.