When I was a child, my dad brought home from work some black ball-point pens. I remember experimenting with line and cross hatching in what was, for me, an exciting new medium!  This experience seems to have laid the foundation for how I'd later work with line, scraperboard and pencil.

 I really enjoy the combination of pencil and ink wash.  I use a cross-hatching technique more often with the sharp, filed pencil point to create tones, than the ‘shading' method using the broader edge of the pencil.

Reed Warbler and Cuckoo

 In this example, of a cuckoo chick ejecting a Reed Warbler's egg, my rows of pencil lines are overlapped, or ‘cross hatched'.  The darker I want the tone to become, the more pressure I apply and the more lines I criss cross.  The pencil drawing is sprayed with a fixative to avoid the lines softening under the applied ink wash.  Then, I gradually increase the dark tones with successive layers of ink, as you can see on the Reed Warbler's head and in the shadows of the nest.

 For the cuckoo and unfortunate Reed Warbler chick, I visited the British Museum at Tring, where I studied and measured chicks from their collection of birds preserved in  spirit-filled jars.  From those drawings and photographs, I made life-sized plasticene models of the chickss, the egg and the nest, which I used as a basis for this drawing.