Cartooning & Sketching Techniques for Engineers.

Today's question comes all the way from Indiana from Joran who is a Masters student at Purdue University.  Joran writes:

". . . I am actually currently studying how to do design sketching for engineering. Could you do a post on cartooning or sketching techniques?"

Absolutely! I know several techniques that can widen the variety of marks the can be made as you design. These can give you the ability to better describe the forms you create for your engineering projects.

The main technique of cartooning is known as line or linear drawing.  This consists of making use of lines to describe your concept or subject, which means that instead of using colour to describe the object you use a wide variety of marks & lines as the vehicle of expression. Often cartoons and sketches can be inked in (coloured, like you would in a colouring book) after the drawing is completed to add more detail to the drawing.

Lines can be spontaneous, heavy, light, eloquent, or economical. Shadows and highlights are suggested with lines that are heavy or sensitive. Good line drawing techniques will serve your goal to express and convey your imaginative ideas.

In cartooning it is important to practise form & modelling techniques. Form describes the visual appearance of shape and volume. Modelling describes the weight, texture, and lighting which the form naturally has or is given by the artist.

Form & Modelling techniques include feathered marks, hatching & cross hatching, solid shading, bracelet shading, stippling, erasing, oblique marks, cross contours, and thick & think lines. Experiment with these and other different marks to see what kind of textures and surfaces you can represent. Experiment with the method you lay your marks with. You can try making each of these marks loosely or with a tight meticulous method.

I scanned in a page from my sketchbook demonstrating each of these techniques, it appears below the explanations.

Here's a definition of each of the Modelling & Form techniques:
Feathered Marks: a delicate mark to emphasize soft textures and forms.
Hatching: a series of straight parallel lines placed near or far from each other to describe shade & weight of a shape.
Cross Hatching: A series of straight lines that intersect with one another, drawn far or close together, to create the shade and weight of a shape.
Solid Shading: Pen or pencil marks laid in a continuous motion, drawn to create solid forms.
Bracelet Shading: creating curved lines next to each other to suggest a circular or cylindrical shape.
Stippling: A series of dots placed far or close to each other.
Erasing: A solidly drawn area where the eraser is applied to lighten or remove part of the solid area.
Oblique Marks: these are shapes and values that are placed in & around a shape to create a 3-D effect.
Cross contour: these are straight or curved lines which describe the surface shape of an object. They can be used as a grid or parallel lines.
Thick & Thin:  lines which are created by exploring the whole nib or bristle of the pen, pencil, or brush used to create the mark. Thick lines can describe heavier weighted materials while light lines depict lighter materials. Lines can become very expressive in the speed at which it becomes thick or thin.
Negative space: Avoiding certain spaces of an object and drawing the space around it is called negative space drawing. The marks are made in the space where the subject or object is not. This is an exploration of shape and information around the subject.
Smudge shading: using tool such as a rolled up piece of paper, a q-tip, a finger, or a compressed cotton smudge stick a gradient is created from dragging the tool through the drawing medium of ink or pencil.

If you are unsure about beginning a drawing with ink you can begin by using a hard lead pencil, such as a 6H, then draw over the lines with ink. By so doing you can perfect the proportions you want before setting them in ink. This can also help to develop your observation skills.


Choosing the Support, or the Drawing Surface
One important note about the support (drawing or painting surface) that you choose: using a paper that is very smooth such as Bristol paper, illustration board, or cartridge paper will help the ink to glide smoothly and it will prevent your pen tip from catching erroneously on the fibres of the support/paper.

Joran, I took a look at your drawings and you're doing great so far. Keep up the good work. Practising these sketching techniques can help to expand your talent in drawing, your ability to convey shape and form, offer greater detail to your sketches, and to convey your ideas fully! These drawing tricks will help "level up" your sketches.

Good Luck Joran. Thank you for your question.

Keep creating.  :)