Adding screentones
We’re looking into how to use screentones with a layer mask to control shades of black and white for a manga.
In the old days, printers could only print black ink writing and drawings on paper. This meant that older printed illustrations didn’t have gray tones. Artists had to draw detailed dots and line patterns using black ink in order to express gray tones for printing. But it’s time consuming to do that! To make the process faster, people invented screentones.
Screentones, or halftones, are made of a pattern of dots that provide shading. Back in the days before digital art, these tones would be printed on a big sheet of sticky-backed plastic. Artists would apply this large, clear sticker over their art and then carefully use a sharp knife to cut out the areas that didn’t need tone on them and peel away the excess. The downsides to this method were that you had to keep buying new screentone sheets and that, sometimes, a careless...