Ricochet Rita
Just as the artist, it's both stylish and sexy ^^
heart Someone's fishing for a print, aren't they?
heart The halftone turned out fine. A little smaller than I intended, but again: TEST PRINT! It's hard working with just one monitor when I do these. I'd mount a second but I'm not allowed to do that to the wall.
crying There's a major difference between what people do in comics and what people do in manga. In manga, you do need a very high resolution printer at times because they're working with screen tones that get incredibly complicated. These aren't just halftones, they're entire panoramic vistas. They have flowers and stars and snowflakes and these subtle little bits of crap filling up space. This get muddy a lot faster than a simple tone.
With Benday dots, the process is different. You're only using them to create a halftone or at most, a series of subtle grays. A gradient is super easy because it's just supposed to look like "dark to light," not "dark to field of poppies with lightning and glowing balls."
In American comics, you sort of want to see those dots. It's a style thing, otherwise at this point I could very well just use a gray tone. You have to make them large enough to be distinguishable but fine enough that the particular shade you want shows through. Ten dots are too large, they look like big circles. Two hundred dots are too fine, they just look like gray color. The magic balance is in between. So with Benday dots, it's more about the sizing of the dots than the resolution of the printer.
With manga, you want that sort of screen look, but you don't want the dot-tone to really show. There's a lot more balance involved. Finer dots will allow finer tones and more detail (tra la la, shojo roses EVERYWHERE!), but the finer it gets the more it looks like a
gray color instead of a
halftone. At which point, you might as well just print in grayscale. Larger dots will of course give you that delightful graphic effect, but it's way hard to make that field of poppies look like poppies and not "dot-dot-empty-space-dot."
So the trick there is finding a printer that can do each and every individual dot without them bleeding together.
Generally, I say just use fewer roses.
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