In the world of urban sketching, where each line helps capture a moment in time, hatching is one of the most powerful techniques available to you. While often introduced as a simple method for shading, it’s far more than that. Hatching is a tool that adds depth, suggests texture, enhances tone, and breathes life into your work.
In this article, we’ll explore how celebrated urban sketcher Ian Fennelly uses hatching to create rich, dynamic, and layered sketches. His drawing of “Chelsea Village” in New York, featured in the new Neighborhoods of New York sketching course, offers a masterclass in how to harness the true power of this technique.
Whether you’re an amateur urban sketcher or someone looking to refine your technique, this guide will help you understand what hatching can bring to your pages—and how you can start using it more confidently today.
What Is Hatching—and Why Does It Matter?
Let’s begin by clarifying what hatching really is. At its core, hatching is the use of repeated lines—usually parallel—to create a sense of light and shadow, density, and surface texture. These lines can vary in direction, pressure, and spacing depending on what you’re trying to achieve.
What makes hatching so valuable in urban sketching is its flexibility. With just a pen, you can create everything from subtle tonal shifts to bold areas of shade. You can mimic the roughness of brick, the grain of wood, the shimmer of leaves, or the solid weight of stone.
Ian Fennelly sums it up beautifully: hatching gives sketches “another layer of tones… it just makes the image more visually rich and varied.” It’s not about precision—it’s about impact.
Ian Fennelly’s Chelsea Village: A Study in Dynamic Hatching
Chelsea Village is a bustling neighbourhood located on Manhattan’s West Side. It’s packed with character—red-brick buildings, leafy trees, street signs, shopfronts, and sidewalks full of detail. Ian Fennelly captures this complexity through the considered use of hatching. Let’s break it down.
- Building Facades: Adding Age and Character
Ian uses hatching on the building walls to bring out the texture of the old red bricks. His lines follow the contours of the surfaces, with increased density and pressure in shadowed corners or along sides turned away from light.
This method doesn’t just replicate the physical texture of brickwork—it adds depth, creating a 3D effect that gives weight and structure to the buildings. They feel grounded, weathered, and full of history.
- Pavement and Sidewalks: Creating Grounded Perspective
The pavement in Ian’s Chelsea sketch is more than just a flat surface. With thoughtful hatching, he adds visible texture, giving the street a gritty realism. He varies the line direction to reflect perspective—lines follow the natural curves of the pavement and street crossings, pulling the viewer’s eye into the scene.
By doing this, Ian reinforces the depth of the urban environment, making the street feel more real and tactile.
- Trees and Foliage: Organic Flow Through Line
Nature contrasts sharply with urban architecture, and Ian embraces this contrast through looser, more fluid hatching. His trees aren’t defined by each individual leaf but rather by expressive strokes that suggest movement and structure.
This shift in approach—going from rigid architectural hatching to free-flowing organic lines—gives the sketch a dynamic balance between manmade and natural elements.
- Street Furniture: Highlighting Details That Matter
Ian’s urban scenes are full of character, and much of that comes from smaller details like lamp posts, bollards, benches, and signage. These are brought forward using hatching that gives each object a slight dimensional boost.
Rather than letting these elements fade into the background, Ian’s hatching ensures they contribute to the texture and story of the space.
- The Skyline and Background: Subtle Touches for Atmospheric Depth
In the background, hatching becomes subtler. The lines are lighter, thinner, and more widely spaced. This technique lets the distant elements recede, creating visual depth and allowing the foreground to take centre stage.
Choosing the Right Pens for Hatching in Sketching
When hatching, your choice of pen does matter—though not as much as your control of it. Ian favours fine liners, typically 0.1 and 0.2mm, which allow for detail and subtlety. He occasionally uses a 0.05 for delicate touches or a 0.3mm for more assertive lines.
He rarely uses cross-hatching (lines in multiple directions). Instead, he sticks to consistent parallel lines, changing only pressure, spacing, and speed to build tone and form.
This straightforward method creates a layered, dynamic look without overcomplicating the technique—a particularly useful approach for beginners.
Step-by-Step Hatching Exercises
If you’re inspired by Ian’s work and want to try hatching in your own sketches, here are some simple exercises to get started:
- Practice with Shapes
Draw a few random geometric or organic shapes on your page. Then hatch them using different line directions—horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. Try varying the spacing between your lines and notice how it changes the density and mood.
- Vary Pressure to Add Tone
Use the same pen to apply light, medium, and heavy pressure as you hatch. Darker, denser lines will form in high-pressure areas, while lighter tones will emerge where your grip softens.
- Add Shadow Gradually
Start with tight, dark hatching in one corner of a shape. As you move across, reduce pressure and increase spacing. This fading technique mimics natural shadows and adds a three-dimensional look.
- Focus on Texture
Take a photo of a textured wall—sandstone, for instance—and try to sketch just a portion of it. Outline a few of the bricks, then use hatching to differentiate each one. Adjust direction and pressure to suggest how light hits each surface differently.
- Incorporate Perspective
Sketch a simple street scene, even from a photo. As you hatch the pavement or building sides, adjust the direction of your lines to follow the perspective lines. This small change can vastly improve the depth and realism of your drawing.
Embrace Imperfection: Make Hatching Your Own
One of Ian’s key pieces of advice is to embrace imperfection. Hatching doesn’t require ruler-straight lines or mathematical accuracy. In fact, its power often lies in slight irregularities. A few shaky lines or inconsistent spacing can bring life, warmth, and texture to a sketch that feels personal and expressive.
So don’t worry about being too neat. The goal of hatching isn’t to replicate reality but to enhance it—adding emotion, structure, and rhythm through the flow of your lines.
Final Thoughts: How Hatching Brings Your Sketches to Life
Hatching has the power to transform your urban sketches from flat outlines to layered, dynamic scenes full of character and depth. Whether you’re capturing the rough façade of a building or the flowing branches of a tree, thoughtful hatching lets you tell a richer story.
Through patience, observation, and practice, you’ll soon see how this simple technique can become one of the most expressive tools in your artistic kit.
So next time you open your sketchbook, don’t just draw—hatch your way into a more textured, layered, and immersive scene. You’ll be amazed at how much more alive your drawings feel.
And remember: perfection isn’t the goal—expression is. Keep your lines loose, your grip light, and your mind open. Happy sketching!
Ready to learn more?
Ian’s Neighborhoods of New York course is an ideal opportunity to watch hatching in action. You’ll see exactly how he approaches each scene, why he places hatching where he does, and how he balances the rest of his sketch around these lines.
Learning directly from a master gives you the clarity and encouragement to keep experimenting. As Ian shows, hatching isn’t just a technical skill—it’s a visual language. One that, once learned, will stay with you forever
