Hatching is one of those jobs that makes a manga page look better and takes forever to do.
If you have not run into the term: hatching means filling an area with lots of fine parallel or diagonal lines to create shadow, depth and texture. In Japanese manga it is usually called kakeami when the lines cross, or just diagonal shading when they do not.
I use it constantly, and most of all for one thing: dark, heavy skies right before it rains. Nothing else gets that weather onto a page as convincingly.
Here is the brush that does it in seconds.
MANGA TOOLKIT is a series about the tools I actually use to draw DURRUN — brushes, materials, auto actions, workflow habits. Written for indie manga creators drawing their own pages, with no studio and no assistants.
Why Hatching Is Harder Than It Looks
Here is the trap. Hatching looks like something you can just do. Draw a bunch of lines close together, done.
And you can. You will get some hatching that way.
But hatching that actually looks good needs the lines to be even. Even spacing, even weight, even angle, held across a whole area. That evenness is the entire effect — it is what turns a bunch of lines into a surface. And doing it by hand takes real experience and a lot of hours.
So it sits in an annoying place: high impact on quality, high cost in time, and no shortcut through practice.
The Brush
Unless you buy the shortcut.
ありえん凌みのあるハッチペン — a set of hatching pens
CLIP STUDIO ASSETS Content ID: 1938898
Brush set · CLIP STUDIO PAINT PRO/EX · 100 GOLD
In the clip I am using the sub tool 凌みハッチL筆, one of several pens in the set.
This one is not free, and it is not the ten-CLIPPY kind either. It is 100 GOLD, which for ASSETS is towards the upper end.
I still think it is an easy call. Weigh it against the hours you would otherwise spend hatching by hand, across every page, for as long as you keep drawing manga. It pays for itself somewhere in the first chapter.
No affiliation, no sponsorship, no affiliate link. I bought it, I use it, that is the whole relationship.
Why I Am Telling You About It
If you are drawing manga on your own, the thing standing between you and finishing is almost never talent. It is time.
You have a story you want people to read. I would rather you got it out into the world quickly and at a quality you are happy with, than lost three weekends to filling skies with parallel lines.
That is really the whole reason this series exists. Buy back the hours where you can, and spend them on the parts nobody can do for you.
Watch It Happen
The sky, start to finish:
Watch this reel on Instagram
More short manga-production clips go up on Instagram @aitokitazaki. The ones worth explaining properly end up here.
See It in an Actual Manga
That panel closes out Episode 18, INTERSECTING — the very last page.
A dangerous man has just broken out of the prison on that island, and he is not somebody you want walking free. Nothing in the panel says so out loud. The sky does it instead — heavy cloud pressing down, a storm tearing across the water.
That weather is the hatching. It is doing the work of telling you something bad is coming.
More from the Toolkit
Manga Speed Lines in One Stroke, Without Covering Your Art
Speed lines are lines, and lines hide the drawing. This free tool lays them down as tone instead.
Manga Sound Effects: The Brush That Writes Like Calligraphy
Why onomatopoeia is part of the drawing and not just text, and the free Clip Studio Paint brush that writes it in one stroke.
Manga Focus Lines in Clip Studio Paint: The One Thing to Get Right
Which sub tool does the work, why there is no correct setting, and the single rule that decides whether a set of focus lines works at all.
Manga Flashback Tones: Which One Goes with Which Memory
Which tone marks an ordinary recollection, and which one marks a memory a character has been avoiding.
Go Read It
Soujun is sixteen, and he lives by one rule: never take a risk. He and his little sister can't afford one.
Then, for her sake, he takes exactly one. A single delivery, off the books, no questions asked.
That one risk turns him into a monster — a Fuser — and drops him, without his ever choosing it, into a world made of nothing but risk: the TOKYO underground.
DURRUN is a neo-TOKYO underground shonen manga. Every episode is free to read in English, right here.
And hey — go read DURRUN. Por favoooor 🙏
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