Lesson 5.3
Material Hatching: Showing What It's Made Of
When you cut through a wall, the section reveals its guts — but is it brick, concrete, timber, insulation? Hatching is the patterned fill that tells you, at a glance, what every cut material is.
Start hereDiagonal lines mean one thing. A speckled stipple means another. Little triangles, another still. Each pattern is a material, agreed by convention so a builder reads the wall's make-up without a single word.
It's poché (Module 4) made specific — not just “this is solid,” but “this solid is concrete.”
01 — The pattern library
Common materials, common patterns
Hatching applies to cut material — anything the section or plan slices through. Each material has a conventional pattern. These are broadly international, codified in standards like ISO, though some regional variation exists.
The patterns are chosen to be distinct at a glance and to survive photocopying and scaling. Where a pattern might be ambiguous, a legend names it — same discipline as symbols.
Brick
Concrete
Timber
Insulation
Steel (solid)
Earth / fill
Stone
Glass
Patterns chosen to read at a glance and survive photocopying. A legend resolves any ambiguity.
02 — Hatching in context
A wall, layer by layer
Real construction is layered — an external wall might be brick outside, insulation, then blockwork inside. In a section, each layer gets its own hatch, so the drawing reads as a cross-section of the actual build-up. Tap to build the wall.
Each layer of a real build-up gets its own hatch, so the section reads as the actual construction.
03 — Restraint
Hatch the cut, not the world
A common beginner error is over-hatching — filling every surface until the drawing is a sea of texture. The rule: hatch only what's cut. A floor seen in plan isn't cut, so it isn't hatched; the walls, which are cut, are.
Restrained hatching keeps the cut material reading as solid and important (lineweight hierarchy again) while seen surfaces stay quiet. When in doubt, less hatch, lighter hatch.
How you hatch depends on scale. At 1:100, a brick wall is just a solid poché or a simple diagonal — there's no room for detail. At 1:5, the same wall shows individual bricks, mortar joints, the insulation's texture, even fixings. The hatch grows in detail as the scale lets it, a direct link back to Module 2: the scale sets how much the drawing can say. A skilled drafter keeps hatch density readable at the intended scale — too fine and it greys out when printed small; too coarse and it looks crude up close. The pattern serves the scale, never fights it.
12 minutes
- From the library, draw three hatches by hand: brick (diagonal), concrete (stipple + triangles), timber (grain). Keep them distinct.
- Draw a simple cut wall and hatch only the cut part — leave the floor seen-below unhatched.
- Build a two-layer wall (brick + block) in section, each layer with its own hatch and a leader naming it.
Key terms — added to the Drawing Atlas
- Hatching
- A patterned fill of cut material showing what it is made of — brick, concrete, timber, insulation.
- Poché vs hatch
- Poché fills cut material solid to show mass; hatching adds a pattern to that fill to identify the specific material.
- Material legend
- A key naming each hatch pattern's material, resolving any ambiguity between similar patterns.
Check yourself
2 quick questions — pick an answer to see why.
Q1Hatching should be applied to…
Q2How does drawing scale affect hatching?
- Hatching is the patterned fill of CUT material, telling the reader what it's made of.
- Each material has a conventional, broadly international pattern; a legend resolves any ambiguity.
- Layered construction gets a hatch per layer, reading as the real build-up.
- Hatch only the cut, and let the hatch's detail follow the scale.
Dimensions, symbols and hatching make a drawing readable. But the figures that GOVERN — minimum door widths, stair rules — come from codes, and codes differ by country. How do you design across them?