Stipple

Well.. here's the first shot of me beginning this work, even though this would be a few days old.

Just to give myself an idea of where everything will be going, I start the piece in watercolor.. I do the background and then put down some colors for the butterfly itself. Once everything's nicely dry (about a day or two) I start stippling mostly the black for now, but there are other colors coming into play also.

With stippling you can run one color over the other and the human eye does a wonderful job of filling in the blanks. Course, having the watercolor there really helps too.

A little "history" here.. I first learned about stippling when I was working in the advertising department of a local company. I was a really adept cross-hatcher but the problem with that was it didn't reproduce very well in the newspaper. It would get a little blobby.. so I was told about stipple and thought I'd try my hand at it.

Around the same time, a friend asked me if I'd ever done any art for silkscreening (t-shirts and such).. I told him no, but I was willing to try. And that was where I REALLY learned about stipple. At the time, I could only use 6 colors.. I did my own transparencies in stipple.. one sheet for each color.. and it was labor intensive. But some of the designs were pretty good (course it's been over 20 years and I don't think I have any of those lying around.. but I'll check).

At any rate, in black and white you can get some wonderful, soft textures and in color.. they just blend beautifully.

If you would like to see the entire sequence of pieces, including the finished one, please go to the "Ink" group discussion about the blue butterfly.. and thanks for looking and reading.