A whale shark, the world’s largest fish, drifting through the pelagic netherworld…I almost saw one in Koh Tao, but we couldn’t get close enough, and there were too many people in the way, their respirator bubbles reducing visibility (not depicted here).

I came to this class after spending a lot of time learning about drawing, part of which is the ‘language of line’-how each mark we leave on the paper describes both the shape and the emotional qualities of the object. This is great for doing expressive drawing, but less effective for structurally anatomical illustrations, and stippling seems like a great complement - each dot describes the shape and shade of the object, but the composition speaks for itself.

I set myself some hard practice for this task, used three different pens to stipple my whale shark, and spent quite a few hours refining the shape and shade as I went along. For my next project, I will try something different, colours of pen on different colours of paper, like white and black pen on grey paper, or another whale shark (with more accurate patterning) on blue paper.

But, for now, I need to do something that has lines. No more dots for a few days, to let my eyes reset, though this class was very therapeutic.