Stippling: a portrait made of dots
Stippling is drawing with dots. Instead of lines or soft shading, I build the whole portrait from thousands of tiny dots of ink, placed one at a time with a fine pen.
How it works
Where the dots crowd together, the fur turns dark. Where they thin out, it gets lighter, until only the white paper is left for the highlights. From across the room it reads as one smooth portrait. Up close, you can see every dot.
How it differs from coloured pencil
My usual portraits are coloured pencil, built up in fine, soft layers. Stippling is crisper and more graphic: mostly black ink, with colour where it matters, like a collar or a bandana.
Slow by nature
Every dot is one touch of the pen, and a portrait holds thousands of them. I work across the paper a patch at a time, building the shadows up slowly, because a dot of ink can't be rubbed out. That patience is what gives stippling its depth: the fur seems to shimmer, and no two portraits are ever dotted the same way.
Up close
