Diary of a project

 Or, I am going dotty.

Some of my older friends know that I used to do stipple doodles. Some of my colleagues know that I used to do them in meetings, where the evolving shapes kept stupid idiot drones mesmerised, so the intelligent ones could get on with decision making.

The one above later became the Dangerous Goldfish in my revised Monster Maintenance Manual. (You can see a sample of the ebook here.) (And the paperback version is here.)

Others were done at home, like my take on a work by Mussorgsky. At the time, my ears were stopped up with steppe, and so I did not quite deepict A Night on Bare Mountain with reliable accuracy, but caveat emptor and all that, what you see is what you get, that and no more.

Anyhow, as I have decided to stop writing books, I have bought some new fine point pens, and gone back to stippling.

Here is my first subject, a Roman aqueduct in Segovia in Spain, a name which until then I had associated with incredibly virtuosic guitar playing.

And here is the start of play.

I think this will keep me off the streets for a few weeks.

Let it not be said, however, that I draw the line with this: there is just one rule: dots only!

Now, to see how much further I have to go, take a look at the work of this Ukrainian artist, beside whom, I am a mere doodler. (I note that he calls his work doodles as well, but seriously, his work is totally amazing.

This stipple style lets you mess with texture, and a close look at the original shows that all of the stone is the same. I cannot easily reflect the unevenness of the stone, so I have changed some of the rock to darker stone.

Here is stage 2.