Hero from Miguel Endara on Vimeo.

What?! Another crazy-great video about an unusual art making process? This one also seems like an advertisement for a pen company, but it’s not.

I find these types of videos to be fascinating – especially when they’re this well made. They can give you a great window into an artist’s method in a very short period of time. Of course, with our rapidly diminishing attention spans, we now demand to be shown every bit of information that a video like this has to give in less than three minutes, which can be problematic.

Simplicity and succinctness are cool and everything, but in some cases, pared down filmmaking leads to heavy editing. What I’m getting at here is that I think I learned more about the video and what was happening once I read the “FAQs” added by the artist/filmmaker Miguel Endara on Vimeo.

For example, the ongoing tally of dots on the screen is pretty amazing, but I was floored when I learned that the piece took Endara 210 hours to complete. I also learned the term for his process: stippling. Similar to pointillism, in which dots of different colors come together to create the appearance of a single color, stippling limits artists to just black.

Artists who focus on stippling alone aren’t tremendously prolific because the style is so time-intensive, but it’s hard to argue with the outcome. If you’d like to learn more about how Miguel does what he does, visit his Vimeo page. There are all sorts of goodies there, including how he estimated the final dot count (3.2 million). It’s also a nice reminder that even in this age of ever-increasing digitalization, it’s good to read up on what you’re seeing online from time-to-time.

You can also check out Miguel’s website here.

Related articles

• Miguel Endara needed 3,2 Million ink dots to create the Hero portrait (designmadness.wordpress.com)
• Miguel Endara (charcoalmellowed.wordpress.com)
• Definition: Stipple (bellasugar.com)
• Round and Round (zatista.com)