ANDY FISH

ANDY FISH is a comic book artist

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Adding TONE: The DOT PATTERN

Sketch with DOT-PATTERN added
In the olden days when you wanted to apply dots to an illustration to create the look of shadow and form you bought a sheet of ZIPATONE, cut it out and applied it to the illustration either with self adhesive, glue or through burnishing.

Today you can still buy sheets of tone, DELETER for one still makes it.  You can find DELETER products here in the US at comictones.com -- its very popular among Manga artists so they stock it.

You can also add DOT PATTERNS via PHOTOSHOP which is my method of choice.  Simply create a halftone pattern by going to FILTER>HALFTONE PATTERN and play with different colors to try different halftone pattern.

ADD A NEW LAYER over your illustration and drop the DOTS on top of it.  Change the layer opacity to MULTIPLY and erase the DOTS on the left side of the illo to make it emphasize the form of the figure.