A while back I created a design for a t-shirt. Something that was inspired by dark fantasy and the occult. I also decided from the very beginning that it was going to be a single color and making use of the stippling style.

Meaning

Now, there’s a lot going on. The simple things first: The gothic three-pointed arch and the upside down pinnacles were an easy decision: They are cool. Sometimes, that is a good enough reason for a design decision.

The more complex parts are the crow skull and the hand. The first has a personal meaning which will not be revealed here. But I can tell you about the hand. It’s missing a ring finger. The ring finger often symbolizes a lot of concepts that are generally viewed as positive. Of course, there is love and marriage, but there is also the ancient greek view of the ringfinger containing a vein that leads directly to the heart. And now this finger is lost. Time to think about it.

The Process

The design process began with a pencil drawing which really served only as a rough sketch. This was fairly soon put into Krita and then painted over. This time only the general shapes were important. The next step was a lot of detail work drawing the outlines of everything. And finally, using a stippling brush in order to do the shading. I did not draw each dot individually. There are brushes that will make use of scattering and randomness in order to save you a lot of time.

Conclusion

I like how it turned out. It’s not ideal for all textil printing techniques, because of the detailed nature of it. But I do like the design itself. After some tweaking, the stippling brush turned out better than I expected. There are parts that could be shaded better, but if I consider how much more time it would have cost if I was to place each dot on my own, I’m content with the result.