Stippling Effect Using G’mic
About a month ago I was experimenting with G'MIC in Krita and made a stippling effect using a custom hand drawn texture and the artistic stylization filter. I observed that if you add a gradient to a flat texture it creates a value scale which the stylization filter uses.
I can tell you doing stippling by hand not only hurts after a while but it takes a long time. Nothing wrong with that but personally it is not one of my favorite techniques, so this digital method might be useful if you are on a deadline.
I drew the stippling texture by hand, scanned it in and then cleaned it up using Affinity Photo (any image editor will do). I added a radial gradient in Affinity Photo which created the light to dark values from the center outwards. I wanted the smallest dots to be the darkest values in the picture and the more spaced out dots to represent the lighter values. The reason I did it as a radial image was that it creates a versatile source image, but this method works fine with linear gradients as well. You could use the same process with any texture you like.
After the G’mic filter was complete I had to adjust levels to create the effect I wanted. I recorded a video which shows the process.
The image created looks like this.
