Color Stippling - A Basic How-To

Here’s a simple visual how-to on color stippling. This works great when your drawing calls for mostly primary colors but when you get into skin tones and the such you need to be a bit more creative when it comes to choosing the colors to create your shadows. When you need for your colors to be deeper, place your dots closer together. When you need for them to be lighter, place them further apart. A rule of thumb is don’t use black otherwise your shadows will look too harsh. Then again, once you get the hang of this, rules can be broken. Other than that have fun and play around with the colors to see what works for you but if you’re looking for a starting point work with primary colors until you get comfortable and then explore from there.

Color stippling can be rather time consuming. Knowing how to mix pure colors can be a bit tricky. I still haven’t got this little creature to my liking but it’s coming along.

First Piece - I was walking down memory lane this morning and decided to share my very first piece of stippling/pointillism work. This was done with Pentel felt tip colored markers as one of my high school art assignments back in 1990. (Yeah, I think I just dated myself there, oh well. Lol.)