I am trying to get this stippling effect, and right now I am basically putting each dot (arrow) in place by hand, with duplicate or clone.. I have tried using a brush and that works ok, I have tried playing with the fills but I cannot get an effect I am happy with where the shadowing is heavier along the edge of the vector and lighter as it gets further from a respective edge.. I have also tried using the mesh fills but I cannot get those to work right, even if my life depended on it... I feel like this would be a very simple fill option, where I can say the shading goes from dark gray to light gray over this distance from any edge of the vector but I cannot seem to find anything that will work that I am happy with besides hand placement of each dot... The other thing I was thinking was, is there some sort of way to just click my mouse or my wacom tablet pen in individual spots and get the circles to appear?... I wanted to try the spray paint, but I cant seem to find a good spray pattern that would allow me to make these fills look right... The downside is this takes an immense amount of time that I do not have! Is there anything I can do to improve my fills to give them a 3-d fill. I cannot thank you all enough in advance!
Have you tried the Artistic Media tool? I posted a link in a previous reply to another similar thread. You can get singles dots by just making a short stroke. You can get close stippling by layering random strokes over one another or reducing the spacing of the dot stroke. You can also apply the dot spray list to open and closed shapes/curves. Here's a video to show it in action...
One possible disadvantage is that multiple AM strokes create lots of unwanted control curves. However...I have a macro now (thanks to Shelby Moore!) that will remove the control curves. Let me know if you are interested in this and I'll post an example of how the macro works.
Patti