Crosshatching As A Way Of Life

How many pen strokes did Edward Gorey make to create a single drawing? The answer, of course, will vary depending on the drawing, but the concept is intriguing.

In my previous post, I discussed the Dracula set designs and pointed out that a team of scenic artists had to translate Mr. Gorey's scaled drawings into full sized set pieces. The concept of recreating the heavily crosshatched drawings must have been a sobering assignment...which begs the question, "How many pen strokes needed to be recreated?"

For the Vault drawing shown above, I counted 270 individual stones that had to be drawn. Enlarging the image, I selected numerous stones of varying sizes and shapes and set about counting the pen strokes. My calculations determined that the stones averaged about 75 pen strokes per stone. It should be noted that on the original artwork, a large stone is about 7/16" wide by 3/8" tall and some are much smaller.

This roughly translates to 20,250 pen strokes for the stone wall alone, not including the pile of skulls or the two bodies. It also does not take into account the added pen strokes made to outline the stones and to darken the outer edge of the set piece, so it can be assumed that Edward Gorey created at least 25,000 pen strokes to make this one drawing. This drawing represents only one section of the set for Act 3 making well over a million hash marks for this sets for all three acts combined.