ANSWERS : Living

If you open up the newspaper to the comics section, and the strip is in black and white, you will most likely see a bunch of dots used to shade the strip. For some time I have been trying to find out information about these dots, and have so far learned that they might be called Benday dots, or as I recently learned from a FoxTrot book (Camp FoxTrot), self-adhesive shading film. If anyone knows anything about this, I would like to know (if possible) three things, what are they, how do you use them, and where can you buy them? Thanks Instructables community, because I know if someone has an answer, it would be you guys. Thanks!
-Splazem

Comments

[orksecurity]

The more traditional solution, of course, is crosshatching.

[poofrabbit]

cross hatching and stippling were going to be my suggestion, check out basic drawing techniques, those are used for most cartoons. When cartoons were first put in papers they were most often etchings, woodcuts, dry points, engravings, litos. (Check out printmaking techniques) As time went on and printing changed so do the techniques used to make comics.

[yokozuna]

Benday dots are associated with CYMK (4 color processing) traditionally used in the printing industry. For black and white, the process you are interested in is actually called halftone.  Both of these processes can now also be done digitially using Photoshop or GIMP.

[splazem]

Oh, cool! Do you know how to do it in photoshop?

[yokozuna]

Here is a good tutorial for doing halftone in Photoshop.

[Re-design]

Great! I couldn't remember "halftone".

[splazem]

Does anyone know where I could buy the dot-shading-thing that I could apply to the art? I have photoshop, but I don't want to do it electronically if I don't have to.

[Re-design]

I liked the "rub on" type better than the stick on kind. You don't have to trim the pieces. I used to draw house plans on a drawing board and used the stuff to shade my drawings. Now I draw on computer.

Look up "CHARTPAK". That was the brand I used most. You are looking for graphic shading.

[splazem]

Thanks.

[rickharris]

You already have the answer but you might find this useful if your interested in drawing and shading.

http://www.drawspace.com/

[splazem]

Thanks! That's an awesome website!