Experimentation with dithering. Any thoughts/criticism?

[Hoogo]

Since I hardly ever use dithering I decided to dedicate one piece to it. So I had fun with it.
As to the piece itself it's a heart-shaped gear for today's entry of pixel dailies.


Any feedback is greatly appreciated! 

[Vinik]

I am completely incompetent with dithering so was thinking of doing a study of it just like this. I liked it, it really got a lot of texture. I am a little uncertain about the shape of your gear, specially its profile, was it supposed to be smooth or should it be sharper and the smoothing is a side effect of the dithering interfering on how you would draw its outer border?

Also, is the "flat" surface which holds the face slightly curved for you to get those lovely dithering bands or was it supposed to be flat and you applied the dithered lower light as reflection?

Just some thoughts on it, I liked it a lot, mostly the background dither pattern.

[Hoogo]

The profile of the gear is meant to be straight and rounded. By that I mean that each dent is supposed to have straight and parallel edges but rounded corners.

The surface of the gear is indeed supposed to be slighted curved outwards. This is sort of what I tried to do with the dithering on the outer sides of the gear.

Actually it's very interesting that you talk about a "face" since I drew the outline of said face randomly with a vertical symmetry tool and I didn't really put a name on what it looked like. Now you say that, it looks like a sort of gargoyle face.

Thank you very much for your comment and for your feedback. I'm glad you like the background dithering, I think it's what I had the most fun experimenting about