David Bayo, a self-taught artist from Strasbourg, France, spends hundreds of hours carefully placing tiny ink dots on a white canvas to create incredibly detailed portraits.
To truly appreciate David Bayo’s skills, you need to lean in and examine his amazing artworks up close. Only when you see the millions of dots expertly placed by the artist over dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours, do you begin to understand the hard work and patience that go into each and every one of his stippled portraits.
Photo: David Bayo
Bayo starts off by drawing out the general layout of his portraits with fine pencil lines, and then proceeds to fill up that simple drawing with millions of tiny ink dots. It’s a time consuming and laborious process, but the end result is always nothing short of awe-inspiring.
The French artist first drew attention to his stippling skills two years ago, with ‘Bauhaus’, a beautiful portrait made up of over one million dots, which took him about 90 hours to complete. Earlier this month, however, David Bayo made headlines once again, with an even more impressive project.
Titled Astree, Bayo’s latest stippled portrait took 300 hours to complete and consists of more than 3 million hand-placed ink dots.
“The central point of every (one) of my drawings is definitely the delicacy of the pencil/pen line which is my major concern. It gives that kind of ‘hazy/evanescent’ look and a general rendering really accurate/realistic,” Bayo said. “I can spend hundreds of hours on a single piece, slowly building layers and trying to focus on this particular look I’m really fond of.”
To give people a better idea of the work that goes into his amazing portraits, David Bayo often creates sped-up videos of his creative process.
If you like David Bayo’s art and want to see more of it, be sure to check out his Instagram page, and keep an eye on his YouTube channel as well.
