#screentone

Angemon drawing from the end of 2025 🪽✨

Drawing for Madoka's birthday

Okay I kind of turned into a dog that won’t drop a bone with this, but I’ve been fucking with tone styles all day to get around the problems I have with tone brushes and came up with this layer system in CSP that I used to turn the first image into the second one, and made it available to download here.

The issue I was having was that I wanted screen tone layers I could paint in like you can with screen tone brushes, but I wanted to be able to edit the scale of the dots after I place the tones, and I wanted it to have traditional media grit. CSP does have a layer style that can turn greyscale into dot tones that you can edit the size and angle of, but I wanted something that had more traditional grit and noise. It has a little more visual interest and helps reduce the moirè pattern effect when you see an image at different sizes (helpful for online art that will be viewed at different sizes on different devices and in and out of thumbnail view)

So the solution I came up with was this set of layers that allow you to paint on layers with linked to seamless tiling tones in C, M, Y, and K colours

The easiest way I’ve found to work with this is to figure out the colours I want with one Colour per layer, then I use those layers to create a selection and go do fills on the different cmyk layers until I have the tones looking how I like them

Once you like how the colours look, you can use the object editor and tool properties window to change the scale of the tone layers if you want, this is an example of what they look like reduced to 80% and increased to 150%

To give it that traditional print paper look, I made the black layer slightly off-black and knocked the opacity down to 90%. I offset the layers slightly from each other and then used some texture brushes to scuff up the tones and lineart.

Then you just add paper texture!

Playing around with screentone with Kimberly

Hand Studies - Malevolent