Members of my Art Club and I had our second part of the super fun (and intense) Single Pen Hatching class. This is a challenge posed by my student Ilonka, asking me to teach how to create Zentangle using a single pen — no pencil shading — from beginning to end.

Teaching hatching in such a short series was a challenge and took me a long time to formulate a lesson plan that could help tanglers with solid guidelines on how to hatch.

In Part 1 of the series we analyzed historic examples of engravings and hatching, and practiced some warm up exercises. In this second part, I developed a precise exercise in the form of a small vignette that would help us to experience and consider each different hatching situation.

We developed a picture from beginning to end using a pointy printemps to experience hatching in the form of shading, and added some other tangles such as flux, to try out different types of hatching and textures.

Each and every part of the vignette had a purpose: from tackling hatching in lighter form as modeling shading, to treating shadows, including how to deal with flat surface tangles such as Anthem (Jody Genovese), and treating orbs. Other tangles included were Flux, Shattuck and below you can see Ravel and Hollibaugh (all Zentangle).

In this blog post you can see some variations including the frame, but for most work there were precise instructions of what to do. For the next part, we're going to take all we learned and start working on a piece with a little more freedom, truer to the Zentangle method.

Here you can see some of the examples created by students during our live class. A video recording is available to all current members of my Art Club under the Single Pen Hatching class.