The Journey Thus Far...

It was my exposure to the legendary artwork of Albany Tattoo artist Dustin Horan, nearly a decade ago, that piqued my interest in the technique of Stippling. As a digital artist, I've always enjoyed the challenge of recreating obscure, real-life, art techniques in Illustrator and Photoshop. For me, the art itself has always been secondary to the creation of novel effects. In fact, the art is in the creation of the effects themselves.

Stippling however possess a unique challenge for the digital artist. The stock photoshop effect (Texture>Grain>Stippled) is pretty useless and ugly. In Illustrator, sure you can make brushes, but it's going to take a lot of elbow grease and by the time you're done, you might not like the result. There are a few stipple specific plugins that might assist but they lack creativity, they're just filters (and when I started working on all this, the plugins weren't available).

The Scriptographer plugin, for Illustrator, which was shelved by its developers around the Adobe CS5 days, was the focus of my initial attempts to create digital stippling. Scriptographer allows the user to write Javascript and run it in Illustrator, utilizing nearly all the features of Illustrator, but with far more control than Illustrator's native scripting support. One of Scriptographer's more widely used applications is for converting a photo into a rectangular array of scaled vector objects. Thus creating a half-tone effect but all vector. Using this effect, and some of Illustrators random transforming effects, I was eventually able to come up something resembling stippling:

However, the process was a bear. Making Scriptographer process all those dots took forever. To get anything quality often took multiple attempts, each attempt spent watching a status bar and hoping Illustrator wouldn't crash. The process is also insufficient. The random transforms used to scatter the dots lower the overall fidelity of the output. On top of that, since the image is processed all at once, the end result looks like a filter. It wasn't sensitive to the contrast of the source image, it was "flat." After all attempts to avoid it, I eventually had to dig into the Javascript myself. I had no programming experience at all at the start of this endeavor. I cobbled together a few of the existing Scriptogapher examples and after many google searches, I was starting to get somewhere. At this point, I had a tool, that click-dragging on the canvas would produce dots. These dots would scale according to the images/shapes below them.

This tool was creating some really nice looking art but even more than that, it was fun as hell to use. It didn't work like a filter, it was interactive, it felt like spray painting a stencil but with thousands of vector dots. I wanted to see what other people could do with this effect but there was a problem. As I said, Scriptographer is old. Not only does it require antiquated Adobe software, it requires an antiquated Java Runtime Environment. Try asking someone to check out your Illustrator plugin but attach the caveat "oh, you need CS5 and you'll probably bang your head against a wall trying to get it to work, then you need this other obscure plugin and finally you need my shitty little script and about 30 minutes of me explaining how it works." Needless to say, no one ever took me up on the offer. So for the last five years, the project was just for me. I made some band shirts and Christmas cards with it. Posted some pics on Facebook, got some likes. The fact that it was fun to use and created some novel "you can't do this in Adobe" effects never left my mind. I've been waiting for someone to come up with something similar so I could put the idea to rest. I hardly have what it takes to bring this to the public. Remember, I'm a graphic designer, not a developer. I'm not an entrepreneur and even though I like getting recognition for my work, I disdain being part of a community. About a year ago I finally bought a phone that was actually, kinda, "smart." Of course, still about the cheapest phone LG offered, but sufficient for development. Also, throughout the years, my programming skills had gotten quite a bit sharper. I downloaded Android studio curious as to what the process for making apps entailed and became absolutely hooked on Android development. Suddenly being a programmer/graphic designer has a distinct use. I can code and make the graphics. After making a little game to get familiar with steps, I decided it was time to bring my stippling effect to the public. Since August of 2018, I've been spending a significant amount of my free time putting Stipple together. I've also been spending quite a bit of time using it. Not only for testing purposes but because I can create in a way that's incredibly unique.

What I've created in Android surpasses the Illustrator version. It has more features, controls, is more user-friendly, and is portable. Unfortunately, at this time, the output isn't vector, but is perfectly sufficient for Instagram and Facebook.

Of course, now my trouble is finding people who have Android devices and are also artists. Seems to be a limited demographic. I'll get into that in a different blog. (I'm not proofreading this because I'm convinced no one will read it, but if you find typos feel free to make fun of me in the comments.)