Its ALL DOTS!
Stippling, or dotwork, is one of those art techniques I absolutely love. After I get started, that is. I like to throw a little stippling into many of my pen and in drawings just for texture, but it can be a little bit daunting to plan and begin a full stippling piece. Mostly because the bigger the drawing, the better it looks. Only that means a LOT of dots! (The more dots, the more realistic it looks.) This hen was done on 9x12 Bristol, and took a total of three 005 pens to complete. Some people keep track of how many actual dots there are in their drawings, but I have no clue. Once I get started, I like to just go, and tracking all the dots would be kind of slow and boring. So I will just estimate that there are about a "gazillion" dots in here. Haha. (You can see another stippling piece I did here: "Sasquash, Inktober Drawing" ) This very dotty hen took about three months to complete, but I was working on a few other drawings (for art contest entries) at the same time and was switching off. If you scroll down, you can see the WIP progress photos I took as I worked, and the full finished piece at the bottom:
As soon as I got started on the face, I thought "This will never work. I should have picked a different subject". It didn't seem like the piece was big enough to allow enough detail work, but I kept at it to see if it could still be recognizable.
The farther I got with the head, the better I felt about it. I also thought that as long as the face turned out all right, the rest would be a breeze!
Yeah. I was wrong. The feathers were actually a lot harder. I used a photo of one of my own Barred Rock mix hens as reference, and her striping is a bit wild, not uniform like most would be.
About here, I was thinking "I should have used a different chicken as a model. These feathers are impossible. Maybe I should have just drawn a tree..."
But I was too far in to give up.
More layers of dots, and the feathers started to look more real and less like cartoon shapes. I wasn't after complete photo-realism, but wanted it to look similar to old-time prints.
I started adding the flowers, and working back and forth between them and the feathers whenever I got frustrated.
All dots too!
Many weeks of works later, and it was beginning to look like a chicken! I did not use dots for the black background. Some people do, but I thought a more solid background would make the hen "pop" more. And gives it that illustration look I was hoping for.
Everything else is dots though.
And there she is. All done! Thanks for looking!
This drawing is currently available on a postcard in my Zazzle shop (below).
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