How do you make pointillism art? The techniques and execution strategy

Drawing as a practice that is very useful in advertising, branding, illustration, animation and the rest has many techniques employed for different purposes. After a drawing is done, it has to be shaded to give it form so that it looks realistic or solid. When this is not done, a drawing is said to be incomplete since there will not be any explicit definition to what is drawn on the support.

The above is a skull drawn and shaded with a pencil. The artist student who did this drawing made sure where there have to be shadows, the dots are more concentrated over there. Observe the eye socket, beneath the cranium, the gum and other areas. Without a good variation of the dots, the drawing would have been flat.

Some shading techniques are:

• Pointillism
• Hatching
• Cross-hatching
• Mass shading

Among these, we are going to look at POINTILLISM which is one of the shading or drawing techniques that is time-consuming and maybe even difficult for some to do. Even though the description of this method might sound a little bit scary, it produces a very awesome effect when used creatively.

Pointillism was used for shading the hand

Pointillism when well used can be used to show highlights and dark parts of an object. This is a very wonderful use of this method; the drawing was done first with lines before proceeding to shade with this wonderful method. You can see the effect created by this magnificent technique of shading.

orange with a well-defined shadow in pointillism

See how it can be employed to define shadows for objects. It is a great technique when used with creativity. Patience is needed to do this kind of work because it takes time to get this perfectly done. The orange appears very solid or in other words appear to have form because of how the highlights and shadows have been captured. 

Pointillism as a shading technique is time-consuming and requires enough patience for execution to transition smoothly from one point to another.

Tools and materials for pointillism shading

Actually, every material or tool that is used to shade is able to execute this kind of shading as well.

• Pencil: A very basic but significant tool for any kind of graphite-based shading. The grades 2B, 3B, 4B, 5B, 6B, 7B, 8B etc are the ones suitable for shading. For pencil grades, the ones with the Bs provide softer or darker marks. The size of the dots creates that visual transitioning of light and shadow in an object that appeals to the eye's perception of depth and form. 

With similar dot sizes, the darker areas will have more concentration of dots and the lighter areas having the dots spreading or far apart from one another.

Highlight and shadow depiction using pointillism as the shading technique

• Charcoal: Charcoal is very easily accessible and also good for this kind of shading.
• Paints - Water-based or oil-based
• Brushes: Brushes with the blob structure at the tip are most easiest to use to achieve very rounded shapes for pointillism
• Palette: A tool to mix colours in for working.
• Felt pens
• Markers

Creating light and shadow to depict depth and form

In drawing, illustration or any other form of digital image creation, the aim is to depict that aspect of realism which is shown only when the light and shade or dark areas of an object are well captured. The direction of light rays on an object determines which parts are illuminated and those parts that have shadows.

For pointillism shading to be seen as effectively working in a piece of drawing, the light and shade or shadow variation as the eye will perceive it is key.

Observe how the variation or positioning of the dots has created a smooth transition from the darkest part of the bottle to the light and lighter areas. The direction of light from the drawing is from the left and since the bottle has a cylindrical body the far right side of the body away from the light appears dark. This understanding of how the direction of light affects the illumination of an object serves as a guide to show realism very well. Form and depth is also captured when the technique is coupled with understanding of light.

Preparation and planning

First off, get a visual or mental picture of whatever it is to be drawn and then try capturing that through sketches on paper. Build the structure of the drawing and once the drawing is complete, identify where the direction of light is and determine how that affects the lighting or illumination of the object.