Half Tone Dots are so Old School

[Screened Gear]

Do you do a lot of one color jobs? This is a great way to make them a little more interesting. Use "line" instead of dots for your half tones. This isn't the best example but you can see that the lighter areas are all made up of lines. It’s all done in the RIP so it’s easy to do. Just pick line instead of dot or ellipse. You can pick the angle the lines will run and the LPI of the lines. The LPI does not adjust the line thickness as much as it does with dot or ellipse.

If you have used "line" post your shirts as examples.

[DouglasGrigar]

Do you do a lot of one color jobs? This is a great way to make them a little more interesting. Use "line" instead of dots for your half tones. This isn't the best example but you can see that the lighter areas are all made up of lines. It’s all done in the RIP so it’s easy to do. Just pick line instead of dot or ellipse. You can pick the angle the lines will run and the LPI of the lines. The LPI does not adjust the line thickness as much as it does with dot or ellipse.

If you have used "line" post your shirts as examples.

A point for artists and printers “out in the wild” you can use any dot, kinda-dot (Stochastic) or no dot (posterization - yech) and each will give a specific “look and feeling” to the print.

Try Andy Warhol type comic giant dots, diffusion dither, or hatching/cross hatching.

[mk162]

for really large dots that are perfectly round, try a program called rasterbator.  It's wicked cool!

[Dottonedan]

I'm with ya 100%.  We need to think of different ways to present our work. Just about everything has been done before but what was old is now new and what was new is now old.

I did this in Photoshop using the Grayscale/bitmap/line screen mode. I played with various resolutions until I got something I wanted then saved as a psd and pasted into Illustrator and did a LIVE TRACE to convert to vector.  The same was applied to that background type (the yellow graphics behind the orange type).

[Command-Z]

Halftone dots are NEW school. Before the invention of the halftone screen, woodcuts and engravings used for printing used hatching and cross-hatching. This is a high-tech throwback!

Back in my pre-digital days, I'd use X-acto strokes on black film to do seps that looked like scratchboards or woodcuts.

Oh yeah, and an airbrush filled with india ink with the pressure set WAY low would produce a nice random dot pattern on film or Rubylith.

[squeezee]

I do like lines, they give really tight rosettes.
I think of lines as halftone dots, they are just extremely elliptical.
One of the problems that they have is that the thinner lines tend to fall off the screen and just pull the rest of the line with it.  We have a dot shape that is round/elliptical in the highlights, that becomes a line at higher tones, so if you lose the samller dots the damage is contained.
2p worth.

[Artelf2xs]

before we used airbrushes to splatter a random dot kind of ( Mezzotint) we used to use a technical pen and Stipple each dot :-O

In the early days of screen printing any texture would work.....

Be creative! here I took it a step further..

Circa 2008  I used a line halftone... then Tinted them  with a screened elliptical dot. getting different tones to the lines in each of only two inks.

See how the nose is a percentage of the chocolate dog in front. this is a two color print!

[Artelf2xs]

here is a screen capture of my production file incase you misunderstood. the illustration was saved as a line-tone... Bot positive and negative, with Custom midrange for the shirt.

These where then filled with only a percentage of the spot color... In this pick Pink is white.

[Command-Z]

before we used airbrushes to splatter a random dot kind of ( Mezzotint) we used to use a technical pen and Stipple each dot :-O

Yep, did a lot of that too, but honestly I hate to stipple. Lines are so much more satisfying to draw.

Right before the meaty part of the digital revolution... mid '90s... a buddy of mine (Ronko) invented a "stipple mouse" that you would screw a Rapidograph into and, hooking up to the central compressed-air supply our art dept. had for airbrushes (Maiden West, Dave), it would stipple at the push of a button. You controlled the speed with a small dial. It was genius.

BTW that basset art is killer!

[Artelf2xs]

yeah @ Ocean Pacific Images, Denver, in the eighties we used an AB Pashe Turbo, turned all the way down on pressure and cracked the tip on porpose... then they came out with the splatter tip....

I used to just airbrush or pencil it then shoot it into a mezzo or line  tint on the stat camera! Lot faster....

[Sbrem]

been using that for years, and you're right, it's a great way to punch up one color work. As Scott mentioned, it is older school than halftones though. I had some software back in the late nineties that automated these effects, but damned if I can remember the name.

Steve

[Mr Tees!!]

...I am glad this came up. I have Corel X4, and am wondering how I can show or simulate the actual halftone dot (or hatch or line or whatever) pattern within the file. I would like to do some designs with the "coarse halftone look" that is kinda hot again.

...kinda similar to whats goin on in this example...

http://image.yaymicro.com/rz_1210x1210/0/444/vector-grunge-bike-background-444394.jpg

...anybody shed some light?

[Dottonedan]

Oh yea?  Well, I am so old school that we didn't even have paint invented yet. We had to cut our finger tips with an arrow head and squeeze the blood out and fling it on the cave wall until we got a good image. Sure, you got light headed after a while but those were the days.

[Dottonedan]

...I am glad this came up. I have Corel X4, and am wondering how I can show or simulate the actual halftone dot (or hatch or line or whatever) pattern within the file. I would like to do some designs with the "coarse halftone look" that is kinda hot again.

...kinda similar to whats goin on in this example...

http://image.yaymicro.com/rz_1210x1210/0/444/vector-grunge-bike-background-444394.jpg

...anybody shed some light?

In Photoshop  (if you have photoshop) convert any color image/shape/gradation to Grayscale. I think it requires the image be a grayscale in order to convert to bitmap.  Then choose a resolution that will present very charp clean edges like 300 minimum but if I am taking it into Illustrator to convert to vector, I will double the physical size and make sure the resolution is high like 300 when I do bring it in. Then convert to vector paths to get clean conversions.

So, choose resolution, Then use HALFTONE under METHOD.
Then choose the frequency, angle and halftone "shape".  Use a low frequentcy to obtain LAERGE dots. I like 1-3 at 300 rez for example.

Under SHAPE, is where I created the LINE tone for my tennis ball and blurry type background.

line screen mode. I played with various resolutions until I got something I wanted then saved as a psd and pasted into Illustrator and did a LIVE TRACE to convert to vector.[/quote]


At this point, you can play a little and by going back and fourth by saving copies to decide what shape, resolution and size you prefer. I sometimes lower the rezolution to get BIGGER effects.

There was a nice filter plugin sold for about 30.00 but the name slipped my mind. It's on the tip of my tongue. If I remember, I'll give it a plug. It was pretty good for converting images to a wood cut effect.  I want to say it was made by ambrosia but not sure.  A google search pulls up a few.

[Artelf2xs]

I'm so old school we had to squish the amiba next to us in the primatial soup LOL :-P