Stippling is the name of the technique: making an image, a shadow or a texture out of many small dots or dabs instead of lines. As a noun it can mean both the method ('stippling takes patience') and the result you can see on the page or wall ('the stippling in the sky is very fine here'). Artists use it to control darkness — pack the dots tightly for deep shadow, spread them out for pale areas — and because each dot is a decision, a stippled drawing can take hours for a small area. You meet the word in art class, in printmaking, in scientific and medical illustration, and on banknotes and old engravings. Decorators use it for a dabbed paint finish. Makeup artists use it for dabbing foundation on with a special brush. It is also the -ing form of the verb, so it turns up in ordinary sentences: 'she was stippling the background all afternoon.' As a noun it is uncountable — you say 'a lot of stippling', not 'many stipplings'.