Deleter Screen - Old-School Comic Tones

Deleter Screen. It is a fabulous rub-on transfer (like Letraset or stick-on tattoos...), that you can use to create 'old school' dot-screen / halftone shading effects in your comics and illustrations. Very handy for creating those funky retro repro looks for illustrations - or Pop Art a la Roy Lichenstein. If your budget doesn't stretch to Deleter Screen, all is not lost. You can create the illusion of tone in Photoshop. I came across this great halftone effect tutorial for Photoshop on Melissa Clifton's website.

You can also create a dot-screen look, albeit rather laboriously, with a black pen by using a fairly large diameter fiber-tip pen and simply dotting the pen for a stipple effect. Be sure to use a waterproof ink if you're going to add colour afterwards - or add your colour first.

Nina Johannson also discovered Deleter Screen, and blogged it complete with pictures at The Drawing Club, 'Instead of Crosshatching'.

Comicraft at Balloon Tales also has a clear, super-easy tutorial on Comic Book Halftone using the CYMK mode in any graphic software.

More Ink Textures:
Basic Ink Textures
Textures - Brick and Stone

And while we're on the topic of comics... Tutorials at Chris Aldridge's Steel Dolphin
Preparing Line Art for Coloring (cleaning up your digital drawing)
Computer Rendering (coloring-in your comic)