Ink Textures for Walls, Wood, Barns and Stone

Rendering building textures in pen and ink

Rule: These notes add specialist tips to your answer. They do not replace it. Always give your full general answer on the question (materials, composition, technique, troubleshooting) and work these tips in wherever they apply.

Pencil first

• Pencil guidelines come before ink for brick courses, shingle rows, clapboard rows, roof texture lines and cast-shadow areas. They keep rows straight and even.
• Pencil in the small white gaps where branches, wires, ropes or twigs cross dark areas, before inking the dark.

Brick

• Brick has four tones:
  1. Missing bricks: not drawn, only hatching over the area.
  2. Bricks in outline or partial outline, showing only the two shaded sides.
  3. Most bricks: medium tone by hatching.
  4. A few bricks: dark, by crosshatching or darker hatching.
• Do not draw every brick in the wall.
• Draw the courses in pencil first so the rows run straight.
• The direction of the toning lines does not matter. Vertical, horizontal or angled all work, and they can be mixed.
• Order of work: outline the bricks you want to show, darken those in shade and a few in sun, then finish the shading and shadows.
• In shadow, make more bricks dark, then hatch over the whole shaded area, bricks and all.
• Keep background trees behind brickwork simplified.
• Add a cap shadow under the wall cap as a late step.

Cut and weathered stone

• Stonework has the same four tones as brick, but the stones are not aligned and not all the same size.
• If the mortar is dark, draw the joint lines dark.
• Weathered stone sequence (steps A–F):
  • Step E: put the shadow at the bottom of each stone.
  • Step F: darken some stones a little, and a few a bit more with crosshatch.
• Leave the top edge of every stone white to show sun glare. This also applies to the rough stones below brick.
• Do not shade all the stonework evenly. Let sunlight wash out nearly all detail toward one corner (the upper right in the example).
• Smooth stonework can be shown with stippling.
• Dots can show the shadow of window mullion strips on curtains, which adds depth.

Rough, irregular stone (e.g. chimney)

• Pencil each rock first, making every one a different size and shape.
• Indicate the shadows from the irregularities on each stone surface.
• Add gray tone and darken the shadows, but leave a few highlights.
• Draw the mortar with stipple marks so it contrasts with the stones.
• Finish by darkening the shadows, adding shadow on the mortar, and making a few stones darker than the rest.
• Omit the outline on an edge that sits in highlight against a darker tone behind it.

Wood and barn boards

• Far away, show only the darker spaces between the boards. In the foreground, add wood grain and a rough surface.
• Show only a few board spaces in sunny areas. On the dark side, make the board spaces quite heavy.
• Then hatch over with vertical lines only.
• For grained boards, draw the grain first, then crosshatch to darken.
• Build deep darks by crosshatching over three or four times.
• Barn tone scheme: light, medium and dark.
• Order of work on a barn: interior first, then the shade on the hay bales.
• Build dark areas one step at a time.

Roof shingles and tiles

• Pencil roof guidelines so the texture lines run parallel to one of the two roof edges. Lines in any other direction make shingles look like they are standing up rather than lying down.
• Use the flexibility of a Crowquill pen to show the shadows of tiles. Hatch some of the tiles and leave the sun-glare areas white.
• Slate roofs: break up the monotony with glare.

Shingle siding

• The defining feature is the shadow at the bottom of the overlapping pieces.
• Show a few of the vertical spaces between shingles. Darken them, some more than others.
• Remove nearly all detail where sun glare strikes.
• Pencil guidelines keep the rows even. Allow slight irregularity from shingle to shingle.

Clapboard siding

• The defining feature is the shadow beneath the bottom of each overlapping board. Draw it as horizontal lines or as rows of dots.
• Pencil the lines first so they come out straight.

Stucco

• Stucco is light-colored with a fine, granular texture.
• Close up, show it by stippling, using just enough and not covering the whole surface. Too much stippling spoils it.
• Stucco is often cracked, and underlying bricks sometimes show where it has fallen off.
• Old post-and-beam buildings were often stuccoed between the beams.
• Too far away for stippling, use an even tone: white in sunlight, light even hatching in shade.

Glare (sun)

• Leave glare areas white: tile roofs, window patches, the edge beside a door, stone tops, and the tops of shingles or boards.
• To get full glare on a tile roof, run the surrounding dark tone (e.g. wood) right up to the tiles. Do not leave large white gaps in that crosshatching.
• Use glare on a roof and on the front of the main building to create contrast at the center of interest.
• Glare also breaks up the monotony of slate roofs and many small window panes.

Shadows and darks

• Make shadows uniformly gray, with evenly spaced lines. Do not use patchy dark clumps with big light spaces between them.
• Shade on grass should be an even distribution of grass marks, not checkerboard clumps with white gaps.
• Put a large cast shadow across a building on last. Finish all other details, pencil guidelines for the shadow, then hatch it all in one pass. This gives a more uniform shadow than adding it piecemeal.
• Where a dark area meets another feature, such as the dark underside of a barn meeting a beam, leave no significant white patches in the dark. When finished, trim the darks tightly to the adjacent feature so the edge is distinct and not fuzzy.
• Where wires, ropes, twigs or branches cross dark areas, leave a white sliver above them. This gives depth, for example a barn sitting behind a tree.

Contrast and distance

• Dark must show against light and light against dark. A fence that crosses both a light and a dark background takes the opposite tone of each, or it disappears.
• Detail decreases with distance. Show a background tree line with almost no detail so it does not blend with foreground detail.
• Do not over-texture a sidewalk, or it can't be told apart from adjacent grass.

Example order for a house, fence and wall scene

1. Start the house.
2. Add a few roof shingles.
3. Add more texture lines on the side of the house.
4. Crosshatch the window and the shadow under the eaves.
5. Put in light foliage first.
6. Darken the right side of the fence risers and the bottom of the stringers.
7. Put in dark foliage and the shadow under the cap on the brick wall.