Visual drawings are those creations you can look at, such

as a drawing or a painting.

The Scribble
- a simple overlapping fill stroke

This is a way to fill an area with value quickly. In a full speed frenzy you can make over
200 strokes a minute. The direction most comfortable for right handed people is diagonally
from left to right and back. Hold your pencil like you are going to write with it. The trick is
controlling the pressure to achieve the tone you want, overlapping each stroke closely to
have unbroken tone, and starting and stopping each stroke accurately to define the form
you are drawing.

Side Stroke
- a favorite technique for sketchers

Holding your pencil pinched sideways, you use the side of the lead in rhythmic back and
forth strokes to lay down grays.

This technique is usually executed loosely and quickly and it helps you focus more on
tonal masses than contour lines.
Smudge and Erase
- getting your hands dirty

If you take the scribble or sidestroke and moosh it around with your fingers the texture
will smooth out and soften.

The pencil is used to deposit graphite areas on the paper where they are smudged into
submission.

An eraser can be used to retrieve lighter values, shape areas, or add highlights.

Wide Stroke
- more thought, less work

If you can only pay attention long enough for quick impressions maybe a broader pencil
line may be in order.

A flat sketching pencil can work like a portable set of gray markers for drawing. Broad
sweeping strokes of gray can be laid down quickly and loosely while you gather your visual
information.
Single Strokes
- straight lines in a row

Using a sharp pencil the area is filled in line by line. The motion is like the scribble but
you lift the pencil tip before you loop back and start the adjacent line.

The density of the line groupings define a value by how close or far way from each other
the individual lines are.

This more refined technique is usually reserved for more "studied" drawings, where you
want to understand a form more fully.

Crosshatching
- drawing lines on lines

When you overlap singlestroke gray-valued layers you create a crosshatch of lines that
combine relative values into a darker value. Outlines are optional.

The flow of the lines in crosshatching usually conforms to or accents the form being
drawn in relation to the rest of the drawing.
Thick 'n' Thin
- the line IS the value

This manner of representing value and form is gimmicky but effective. It is a defined
style of drawing based on the way engravings represent values as linear elements with
width variations that reveal details in the form, texture, and lighting. See kevin
sprouls work, he has mastery of this technique.

This is an image process. An image process is something you can execute perfectly and
still have a bad result if the underlying drawing is bad.

Chris Van Allsburg's book, Ben's Dream, uses a similar style of drawing.

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Pointillism
- gradual controlled build up of dots

Another cliched but effective technique for depicting grays is laying it down dot by dot,
varying how close the dots are to each other.

This style grew naturally from the mellow grays achieved on mezzotint plates, values
created by manipulating great bands of printable dots.

Dots, points, stipple, and halftone image processes have been popular with illustrators
and in the work of fine artists such as Georges Seurat, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy
Warhol.