Stippling with Colored Pencils

Today, I’d like to talk about something that I’ve not seen discussed very much. It’s a way to make marks on paper that’s very useful, but not all that common. But I’ve found stippling with colored pencils very effective for a number of things. Let’s look at two of them.

What is Stippling?

But first, let me explain exactly what I’m talking about.

Stippling is a method of applying color as a series of dots. When entire images are created this way, it’s a method known as pointillism.

The official definition of pointillism according to Britannica is “the practice of applying small strokes or dots of color…so that from a distance they visually blend together. It’s a method of painting associated with Georges Seurat, who invented it. “A Sunday On La Grande Jatte” is the painting said to be the birth of this style.

While this style of painting is most closely associated with oils, it can also be used with any medium, wet or dry.

And that leads me to using stippling with colored pencils.

Stippling with Colored Pencils

Pencils are perfect for stippling. What better way to put small dots of color on paper than with a pencil?

But that’s not the purpose of this article. What I want to do is first show you how to stipple, and then show you when to consider stippling.

How to Stipple

Stippling is easy. Hold your pencil upright and tap the tip against the paper. You can use any pressure, but will usually get the best results with medium or heavy pressure when you want to do any of the three things I’m about to describe.

When your pencil is sharp, you get small dots of color. The duller the pencil becomes, the larger the dots become.

Another result is that the edges of the larger marks are often also less crisp.

You can hold your pencil in a more horizontal position to make more elongated dots.

Stippling works with any pencil on any paper. You can use it with any subject, too, whether you want to do the entire drawing that way or just add accents.

Why to Stipple

Stippling is a great way to accomplish the following three results: Filling in paper holes, darkening areas, and creating texture. Let’s look at each one in turn.

Filling Paper Holes

I wrote about this a few weeks ago in a post about filling in paper holes on Canson Mi-Teintes paper. But this method of filling paper holes also works with other types of paper. I’ve used it on Pastelmat, for example, and it also works with smoother papers.

The secret to filling paper holes with stippling is to keep your pencil sharp, and to hold it in a vertical grip. You may need to practice holding the pencil straight up and down because it isn’t normal. At least it isn’t for me.

But both are necessary. The sharper the pencil, the smaller the point and the more deeply it gets down into the tooth of the paper.

The more vertical you hold the pencil, the more directly it gets down into the tooth of the paper.

Fortunately, when filling paper holes, you probably won’t need to do a lot of stippling.

Darkening Values

Stippling is a great way to darken values when you have difficulty getting them dark enough with more conventional strokes.

This is a section of my daily task tracker. I use this task tracker to keep an at-a-glance record of what I do from one day to the next. Each row of squares is a different task. Each column of squares is a day. I print a sheet for each month, then color in the squares day-by-day.

But since the sheets are printed on ordinary printer paper, and since the printer paper is very smooth, I sometimes have difficulty getting dark enough values. Enter stippling!

In this sample, the green, yellow-green, lavender, and brown rows show one week of activity. The lighter values on the left were drawn with ordinary layering. By the time I got to the end of the week on the right, I was having problems getting darker values.

One day out of boredom, I started stippling the brown rows, and what do you know? It worked! I next did the same thing with the lavender row, and then the two rows at the top of the image.

The last two squares in each row were started with more traditional stroking (hatching and crosshatching.) Then I stippled over the top of those layers. The second last square has some stippling. You can see it’s darker than the next square to the left.

On the last square, I stippled more, and it’s darker still.

Creating Texture

When I stippled the squares above, I made them as smooth as possible by doing several rounds of stippling. Unless you’re very precise, it’s extremely difficult to get absolutely smooth color by stippling. I could see that in the lavender and brown squares.

So the next thing I tried was creating texture by stippling with colored pencils. This time I used pink. This is the same task tracking chart, but turned sideways.

The partial square on the right (between the brown squares) is as smooth as I could make it, but with conventional strokes and stippling.

As I worked my way to the left square-by-square, I made my stippling marks more open. I used the same pressure (medium to heavy), but left more open space between the marks. The result is more texture.

It’s not real bold texture, but it is texture and it adds a bit of interest to an otherwise pretty plain line of pink squares!

Another Example on Different Paper

This is a portion of a coloring page. I used Caran d’Ache Pablo pencils (I used Prismacolors in the samples above), on Canson Mi-Teintes white (the smoother back side, of course!).

Each shape but the circle began with hatching layers of color. Then I stippled to create different results.

In the red shape, I stippled color into the upper corner to fill in paper holes. In the green corner, I stippled green to darken that area, and in the purple shape, I used stippling to create texture.

You’ll notice that in each case, one result is darker color. That’s unavoidable when you stipple.

What about that circle?

In the circle, I alternated between layers of yellow and red to create a blended orange, to fill in some paper holes, and to create texture. There were no underlying layers; all the layers in this shape are stippled. The lighter the value, the more paper is showing through. How cool is that?

Stippling with Colored Pencils

As I mentioned at the beginning, you can stipple with any subject using any pencils on any paper. I use it most often with landscapes to create texture in foliage and in the distance.

So why didn’t I show you on a landscape? Because I wanted to showcase stippling and flat shapes with little or no detail were the best way to do that. Besides, I was having fun experimenting without pressure!

Still, here’s a tree study in which I used stippling almost entirely to draw the large foreground trees. I mixed in a few layers of hatching and other strokes to fill in spaces, but most of the foliage is nothing but stippling.

(By the way, this study is also on Canson Mi-Teintes.)

Stippling with colored pencils is really a pretty versatile stroke to use for other purposes, too. So don’t wait for boredom to take hold of you before you give it a try.

Sign up for Carrie’s free weekly newsletter and be among the first to know when she publishes new articles.

Share this!