#pointillist

pointillism is a style I always appreciate looking at, but often put off doing much of myself just because of how long it takes lol... and I'm afraid their is no way of fixing that, it's just quite a time consuming technique lol! BUT my first piece of advice would be don't let that stop you from trying it since I think a lot of the results from pointillism can be really rewarding!

one thing I really enjoy about pointillism is that I have a tendency to do quite harsh shading sometimes, so it allows me to create more a more softer feel than usual!

I gotta say that I do still struggle a lottt with doing hair in pointillism lol it's so hard to create the appearance of individual strands with just little dots which is kinda why I chose to only do half his hair in this piece pfft I've yet to try and draw curls in this style so am intrigued whether that would be easier than straight hair... will have to get back to you on this lol!

a big piece of advice I'd give is that more than any other style, think of pointillism in terms of layers! start with the shadowy parts, which I used a slightly bigger 'pen' size for in this piece (pen is in quotation marks because I drew this on my phone lol..), and then went in with a smaller dot to blend into the light parts with little to no dots!

one thing about pointillism is that is kinda forces you to draw everything on one level, rather than zooming in to and hyper-focusing on details! in some pointillism works I've done I've actually chosen to use just one size of dot throughout the entire thing, which creates a really interesting sense of uniformity!

final thoughts about this is knowing when to stop, which is true of any art technique lol I think I could definitely have gone even further with this piece adding more and more dots until everything sorta just blends together, but a part of the appeal of pointillism is that you can see those individual dots and how they make up the larger piece, so my advice is to maybe go with less than what you think to keep all the fun texture still in place!

so there's some advice and some thoughts about this technique lol! I'm gonna be trying to experiment with this more casual style of art advice post since I've been really struggling thinking of interesting and specific topics to go into, so hopefully some of you found this informative lol!

so feel free to let me know if there's any particular style of technique I've done that you'd like me to talk about or potentially offer advice and I'll see what I can do!