THE WATERWORKS

Craftint doubletone paper (DuoShade is another brand) is one of those things an ink illustrator had in their toolbox before the advent of the digital toolset or even rubdown tone systems like Zip-a-Tone. It wasn’t cheap and it gradually fell out of use. Howard Chaykin uses it quite often, though he prefers the graphite/charcoal pattern over the hatched lines I’ve chosen to work with here. I still do all my drawing by hand on bristol, and I prefer to use my computer as the greatest separations tool ever devised by man. So I wanted to recreate Craftint and use it now, because I could never afford it when I was younger and it’s a great way to build up tone.

Craftint had two patterns on it. Apply one chemical to it with a brush or pen and the first pattern was revealed. Use another chemical and the other pattern came up. It required careful planning and tone management, because once the tone or tones were revealed your only option was to take it to white or black. Erasing and reapplying tone was impossible. Photoshop overcomes these limitations with unlimited undos and redos.

I began in Illustrator with an 11×17 sheet (I normally draw my comic pages at 10×15 on 11×17). I applied a 45 degree angle .25 point line across the whole page, making sure they were relatively tightly spaced. In my case, there are more than 16 per inch. Exporting the Illustrator file as a 600dpi greyscale Photoshop image, it opens in Photoshop as a transparent image on its own layer.

Download the Photoshop setup image (172kb)

and here’s a description of how to set it up:

1. Create a new layer and put it at the bottom. Fill with white. Name it “paper”.

2. Name the left sloping lines layer “tint left”.

3. Duplicate the tint layer and flip it. Name it “tint right”.

4. Create two more layers, fill them with white, and place each of them above the tones. These are the analogue to the chemicals. Called “reveals”.

5. Place your lineart on a top layer set to multiply, or put it on an alpha channel to combine it back in later.

Now begin to erase parts of the reveal. You’ll erase the left reveal first, keeping in mind that it will also contribute to the doubletone when you erase the right reveal. If you want to change something, just add white back to the reveal layers. Pressure sensitive brushes with a tablet work well. I prefer to use them in pencil mode to keep the lines crisp where the eraser is applied.

I’ve kept my sizes and resolutions quite high because I’m thinking of print output. They lose their effect at 72 dpi. You can adapt this method for web comics by using less lines per inch, a fatter line and lower resolutions. Say a 1 pt line, 8 per inch and 150 dpi. That’s a guess. You’ll have to experiment.

See the final result (156kb)