Dithering practice.

[Stefano]

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.

• [Comparison between pointillism, halftoning and dithering]
• [Dithering, colour picking and anatomy discussion of Calinerie by William Bouguereau, using a desaturated colour ramp]
• [Helm's "Ramblethread" and the "pixel clusters" principle.]

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.

[Crow]

I'm in fact using only 4 or 5 out of 256:

Don't forget the counterpart of number two

[Helm]

As far as the head goes, great going. I would put a few less structured / noisy dither patterns here and there to break the dot-matrix-printer effect. Also keep in mind you will rarely if ever have to dither with just two colors for a real piece unless you're making a point of it.

[Stefano]

Thank you Helm!

Took me a while, but I can see what you mean now (I think): my affliction to organize the patterned gradient and finally understand dithering resulted in too well defined rows and columns, as if it was printed by an horizontal moving print head.
I did try to sort of zig-zag or offset some dither pieces a little bit but it didn't look right, so I kind of gave up in the process. I'll try some more, now that you've mentioned it.
I think the black and white also contributes to the dot-matrix printer overall feel, but I chose it as a personal challenge, as it seemed to be harder to achieve good results with more contrasting colours.

One thing I now know for sure: learning how to dither is not a mechanical, uniform and linear process like I figured it would be. Even after studying it quite a bit, there's plenty of room to using the technique to your favour or completely destroying your piece.

Back to work now.