I have been practising my dithering skills to try and improve my entry for the
Random Challenge. Pixel art wise, dithering has always been a major pebble in my shoe (along with palette picking) and this seems like a good opportunity to try to get rid of it.
For starters, I'd like to say that I'm fairly well acquainted with with the basic concept of what dither is (and what it's used for) and tried to study Arachne's marvellous mastery of this technique in some of her works. I've also read many
useful posts.
And yet something seems to be still lacking...

----[EDIT 1]----
I'm now dithering something with a less dull topography (still in 2-bit, for the extreme contrast).
I'm starting with the black lines on white background, adding a 50% dither band, in places I see fit.
01.27.2010 - Still upgrading.----[EDIT 2]----
[Ptoing's dither reference!] The major difficulty seems to be creating a illusion on 3Dness with such a markedly 2D-enforcing pattern.
Looks like the less uniform bits of pattern can't be used or they'll break the rhythm and pop up from the rest of the pixel "mesh". Maybe they're meant to provide a smoother ramps for huge areas? I'm in fact using only 4 or 5 out of 256:

Hum....
----[EDIT 3]----
I spoke too soon. I'm managing to assimilate more and more of the shown patterns into the mixture.
It seems the brain slowly starts to visually make sense of each repeating formation (as if they were little pictures or letters) and after a while it feels a lot like you're "reading/writing" the gradient, on a multi-directional text. It's really weird.
I still didn't get rid of the "dot-matrix printer" effect because I could't get it to look right. *sigh*
----[EDIT 4]----
Well, the scope of this work is rapidly getting of getting out of control. But in a good way.
It's teaching me so much more than diether techniques as I read through magnificent dither-related posts I keep finding.
I hope I don't get lost inside the sea of information and end up neglecting my piece as it has happened many times before, but dang: this is interesting!
----[EDIT 5]----
Yep. I'm still working on this one (April 15th).
I've been studying anatomy and hopefully that'll allow me to improve this piece.