This project is inspired by the work of Robert Hodgin, who has done a much more impressive stippling program that you can find here. I used this program to create a self-portrait that I posted to my tumblr here. It looks way better if you just run the app and look at it being rendered live; I had to crunch the image a lot to get it to fit on Tumblr which has a max gif size of 1MB (unless you want to host the image yourself, which I didn't want to have to do).
Here's an example of the output:
And the original image:
As you can see, the source image is totally terrible and I have bags under my eyes from going to a wedding the night before, but I don't have a copy of Photoshop or anything like that and the result was still pretty fun. The Processing program is able to turn its output into a series of uncompressed png images saved at regular frame intervals. I then run these frames through Imagemagick to create an animated gif. The specific incantation used to generate the example image is as follows: convert -delay 10 -size 500x500 -colors 2 -loop 0 *.png out.gif