Book of Flies – Work in Progress Series #1

There are 120,000 + species of flies in the world. Flies have many associations, some darker than others. One of the more positive associations is that of persistence, which seems apt in the context of this stippled piece. I started this drawing on November 1, 2025 and expect that it will take much of the winter to complete. I am starting a tagged WIP (work in progress) series of posts on this blog to document how it’s going.

Book of Flies is a stippled work on hotpress watercolour paper. I’m challenging myself to render the entire piece, 30″ x 22,” with a .25 Rotring pen. I am using no solid lines, which means all of the edges are created through contrasts between values. I love the look of this. Hopefully you can get a sense of the effect through these images.

One of the first things you might notice when looking at the drawing is the Protean forms. Cocoons, pupal forms become bodies, faces sprout from unlikely places, one thing becomes another. I drew Book of Flies to be hallucinatory, giving the viewer many opportunities to revisit the work to find overlooked details or relationships. The best books are like that—right?