Stippling
Shading built from the density of tiny separate dots, with crowded dots in shadows and open space in highlights.
See it
What it is
Stippling describes light and shadow with separate dots instead of continuous lines or smooth gradients. Dense clusters read as dark values, sparse dots read as light values, and the untouched surface supplies the highlights.
For algorithmic work, Adrian Secord's 2002 weighted Voronoi stippling paper is a standard computational graphics reference. By hand, the method suits scientific illustration, tattoo dotwork, engraved texture, and shading that stays handmade up close.
Gotcha: evenly scattered noise looks dirty rather than dimensional. Drive density from the subject's tonal values, preserve clear highlights, and avoid clusters or regular spacing that form accidental blobs and grids.
Ask AI for it
Shade this image with stippling: replace continuous tones with crisp black dots on an off-white ground, map darker values to denser dot placement, and leave highlights nearly empty. Use blue-noise or Poisson-disk sampling to avoid clumps and visible grids, with slight dot-size variation for a hand-inked result.