My mother has a portrait of her grandfather done in stipple. It’s a really beautiful style, and one I had never experimented with, so for a present for my mother, I thought she’d enjoy a portrait of her father in the same fashion.

I used watercolor paper as I liked the texture and it’s what I had on hand. I thought about using the smoother back side of the paper, but I feared it might look weird. I used a Pigma Micron 02 pen, which is supposed to not fade with time.

I found it not all that different from pencil, in that it was easy to get the hand of shading, even if it did take more time and thought. What I did not expect was how long the dark areas take to fill in. The jacket alone in this picture took about 8 hours.

The aspect I found most difficult was the hair. I wanted to do this picture in a bit of a vacuum without taking cues from other examples of similar portraits. This is the only area where I’m not entirely happy with what I ended up with, but I suppose it plays reasonably well.