Emma's work is a combination of techniques that include strataism, pointillism, stippling and even tattoo art. Emma's technique can fall under the stippling category due to the physical action of applying the dots through fibre tip ink pens. Stippling was invented by Giulio Campagnola in about 1510, the ancient technique of Stippling has been popularly used in the fields of engraving and sculpture.

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It is often confused with the similar process known as Pointillism. The major distinction between the two is that stippling uses a single colour whereas the latter can be created with multiple colours like George Seuret’s famous painting “Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”

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Pointillism takes advantage of the way our eyes work with our brains. Instead of seeing hundreds or thousands of individual dots of colour, our eyes and brains can blend those dots into multiple colours that then form an image, simliar to how the pixels of a computer screen work.

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Pointillism is not an easy technique to master. Today, there are very few artists who practice the technique, let alone the combination of the two. Instead, most modern artists blend their colours on a palette to achieve the range of colours they want viewers to see on a canvas.

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Many people notice that pointillist works seem brighter than other paintings because the individual colour points used are quite bright with thousands of tiny white points from the canvas below are visible between the dots.

 

It is breathtaking to behold the level of realism and creativity Emma achieves with this often difficult and time-consuming mechanism. Emma incorporates stippling techniques to achieve a high level of detail and the pointillism application for the array of colour. This technique is perfect for the natural world subjects from the powerful muscles of a horse to a delicate feather of a bird.

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Strataism

Latin definition- ‘Stratum’ or plural ‘Strata’ is one of a series of layers, levels, or gradation in an ordered system.

 

Using multiple materials like watercolour, ink washes and ink dots are accumulated layers in a structured composition.