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How does hatching show light and form in a drawing?

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Watercolor painting by Berthe Morisot showing Edma seated on a sofa in a floral dress with her young daughter Jeanne beside her, both facing slightly right. — Drawing *The Artist's Sister, Edma, with Her Daughter, Jeanne*, watercolor over graphite on paper by Berthe Morisot, 1872; in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In drawing, hatching is a technique used to create shading, modeling, and the illusion of light and form, particularly when using mediums that cannot be blended, such as pen and ink.1

Artists achieve these effects by applying a mass of parallel lines of varying lengths to the surface. The intensity of the shading is controlled by the number of lines used and their proximity to one another: the closer the lines are placed, the darker the resulting impression.123

To further define form and depth, artists often use cross-hatching, which involves drawing lines at an angle so that they intersect one another. This method allows for more complex modeling and has been historically celebrated in the works of artists like Albrecht Dürer, who used it to masterfully indicate foreshortening and three-dimensional volume.23