Screentone is a technique for applying textures and shade

Shade

Shade is the blocking of sunlight by any object, and also the shadow created by that object. Shade also consists of the colors grey, black, white, etc...

s to drawing

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...

s, used as an alternative to hatching

Hatching

Hatching is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing closely spaced parallel lines...

. In the conventional process, patterns are transferred to paper

Paper

Paper is a thin material mainly used for writing upon, printing upon, drawing or for packaging. It is produced by pressing together moist fibers, typically cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets....

 from preprinted sheets, but the technique is also simulated in computer graphics

Computer graphics

Computer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of image data by a computer with help from specialized software and hardware....

. It is also known by the common brand names Zip-A-Tone (1937, now defunct), Chart-Pak (1949), and Letratone (1966, from Letraset

Letraset

Letraset is a company based in the Kingsnorth Industrial Estate in Ashford, Kent, UK.It is known mainly for manufacturing sheets of artwork elements which can be transferred to artwork being prepared. The name Letraset was often used to refer generically to sheets of dry transferrable lettering of...

).

A traditional screentone sheet consists of a flexible transparent backing, the printed texture, and a wax

Wax

thumb|right|[[Cetyl palmitate]], a typical wax ester.Wax refers to a class of chemical compounds that are plastic near ambient temperatures. Characteristically, they melt above 45 °C to give a low viscosity liquid. Waxes are insoluble in water but soluble in organic, nonpolar solvents...

 adhesive

Adhesive

An adhesive, or glue, is a mixture in a liquid or semi-liquid state that adheres or bonds items together. Adhesives may come from either natural or synthetic sources. The types of materials that can be bonded are vast but they are especially useful for bonding thin materials...

 layer. The sheet is applied to the paper, adhesive down, and rubbed with a stylus on the backing side. The backing is then peeled off, leaving the ink

Ink

Ink is a liquid or paste that contains pigments and/or dyes and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing and/or writing with a pen, brush, or quill...

 adhered to the paper where pressure was applied.

A screentone saves an artist's time by allowing quick application of textures to line art

Line art

Line art is any image that consists of distinct straight and curved lines placed against a background, without gradations in shade or hue to represent two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects...

 where a hand-shaded area would not be reproduced in a timely or acceptable manner. Much like halftone

Halftone

Halftone is the reprographic technique that simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size, in shape or in spacing...

, the size and spacing of black dots, lines, or hatches determine how light or dark an area will appear. Visual artists need to take into account how much an image will be reduced when prepared for publication when choosing the pitch of a screentone. Screentones can also be layered to produce interference patterns such as moire effects, or to simulate multiple sources of shadow in an image.

Different styles of screentone exist, variously intended to depict clothing, clouds, emotions, backgrounds, gradients

Image gradient

An image gradient is a directional change in the intensity or color in an image. Image gradients may be used to extract information from images....

 and even objects such as trees. While the sheets are most commonly produced with black ink, there are also varieties in solid and patterned colors. Screentones can also be modified by lightly scratching the backing with an X-Acto

X-acto

X-Acto is a brand name for a variety of cutting tools and office products owned by Elmer's Products, Inc. Cutting tools include hobby and utility knives, saws, carving tools and many small-scale precision knives used for crafts and other applications....

 blade to produce starburst

Starburst (symbol)

A starburst is a symbol consisting of a star surrounded by rays emanating from it. In Unicode, the starburst character is U+273A....

s and other special effects.

Screentones are widely used by illustrators and artists, especially for cartoon

Cartoon

A cartoon is a form of two-dimensional illustrated visual art. While the specific definition has changed over time, modern usage refers to a typically non-realistic or semi-realistic drawing or painting intended for satire, caricature, or humor, or to the artistic style of such works...

s and advertising

Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...

. Use of the original medium has been declining since the advent of graphics software

Graphics software

In computer graphics, graphics software or image editing software is a program or collection of programs that enable a person to manipulate visual images on a computer....

 and desktop publishing

Desktop publishing

Desktop publishing is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal computer.The term has been used for publishing at all levels, from small-circulation documents such as local newsletters to books, magazines and newspapers...

, but it is still used, for example in Manga

Manga

Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...

.

While computer graphics software provides a variety of alternatives to screentone, its appearance is still frequently simulated, to achieve consistency with earlier work or avoid the appearance of computer-generated images. It is sometimes accomplished by scanning

Image scanner

In computing, an image scanner—often abbreviated to just scanner—is a device that optically scans images, printed text, handwriting, or an object, and converts it to a digital image. Common examples found in offices are variations of the desktop scanner where the document is placed on a glass...

actual screentone sheets, but original vector or bitmap screen patterns are also used.