After focusing on major milestone gifts for my parents, I wanted to dedicate my next massive A3 project entirely to something just for me. I’ve always had a massive soft spot for raccoons, our favourite little chaotic trash bandits. I was itching for a challenge that would let me test my technical limits with an entirely new texture, dense animal fur.

Hand-inked on an A3 canvas. To build the realistic illusion of thick coat layers, I carefully layered the dots in rows, mimicking the natural flow and direction of fur growth. I used ultra-dense, pure black ink fields to define the famous dark patches around the eyes, contrasting them against light, sparse stippling for the white facial highlights.

Fur requires an incredible amount of value control. If the dots are too uniform, the animal looks flat; if they're too scattered, it looks patchy. Getting the soft transition from the coarse guard hairs to the dense underfur was an intense, hours-long exercise in muscle memory.

This piece holds a special place in the current lineup because it was done purely for the love of the subject. It stands as a major triumph in my portfolio, proving that the stippling technique can perfectly capture the soft, organic complexity of wildlife on a large, gallery-ready scale.