Elwood Smith asked about the halftone effect, and rather than give a simple answer I’m going to force you to look at a step by step on the entire process, beginning to end. Here we go!

Note: My tutorial isn’t one tenth as charming as ApeLad’s or one fifth as thorough as Jonny Crossbones’. Be sure to check those both out, it’s where I learned this coloring trick.

Idea
I was looking through the 700 Robots list looking for something to draw for Illustration Friday (two birds, one stone, see?) when I found #600, “The Katzenjammer Botz.” I thought I’d like to draw some robot kids, so I went for it. Though I have a mental image of der Captain und der Kids, it was a little fuzzy so my first step was to look up “Katzenjammer” on Google Images. I found this graphic in all it’s low-res glory.

http://www.cyberacadie.com/bd/katzenjammer_g.gif

You can see how much I lifted from the Dirks’ original. What turned out to be of greater value, though, was the color palette. But that comes later, on to drawing.

Materials
I drew on Blue Line Pro Comic Book Page (the paper bleeds a bit much for my taste but (a) I want to make myself worry less about that and (b) I have a whole box of the stuff). I used a .7mm lead mechanical pencil for the roughs, Winsor & Newton 00 sable/synthetic for inks, and Hunt 513 pen for lettering. Ink is Winsor & Newton India ink, white out is Rapidograph white ink.

More details on my flickr page.

Drawing
I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on the drawing, so I did only the roughest of roughs before inking. I might have worked Fritz out a little more carefully, though, because he ended up giving me the most trouble.

Original page size is 11 by 17 inches. I cut it down to fit on my scanner.

Here’s a detail that shows the line quality and also how badly I messed up Fritz.

click for larger

It took me longer to draw a head for Fritz that I thought looked right than it did to draw everything else on the page. I drew about 12 heads on another sheet of paper before getting it right, then transfered it to the original page by scribbling on the back of the sketch (cheap way to make your own carbon paper) then re-tracing it. If you look back at the original drawing above, that is where the three Fritz heads at the top of the page came from.

Homemade carbon paper. You can see how often I traced this.

Here’s another personal obstacle: it bothers me when there are discrepancies between my original ink drawing and the scanned files. It bothers me enough that I will end up spending a lot of time with x-acto knives and glue sticks, cutting and pasting when I know full well I can do the same cutting and pasting in PhotoShop in less than half the time. It’s not worth the effort because the color illustration isn’t a color version of the ink drawing, but a piece in its own right. Besides which, the ink drawing will end up sitting in my filing cabinet anyway. So this time I bit the bullet, scanned in the drawing and did my cutting and pasting and whiting-out in PhotoShop.

Coloring
Here it is scanned into the computer and ready for coloring. It is scanned at 600 dpi black and white line art then converted to RGB. I start by creating a layer above the inks

I then set that layer’s setting to “Multiply” and begin coloring. I did it quickly, pulling colors from the low-res Dirks original I found on Google and using the pencil tool (not the brush) because it leaves a sharp edge between your colors (no blending).

Hiding the ink layer shows just how quickly I colored the drawing. It’s not easy to let go and color it that imprecisely, but it gives a good ‘off register’ effect if you don’t color exactly to the lines.

Now, the fun part. Make sure you are on your color layer, then select Filter>Pixelate>Color Halftone. The only setting I adjusted was Max. Radius which I set to 8 pixels.

If you thought it was overkill to work at 600 dpi, here’s my reason: I find the Color Halftone dots and dot dispersal a bit too big broad at lower resolutions. I prefer to work larger then reduce the file resolution, the dots look better to me and when you reduce from 600 to 300 dpi, the dots will soften a little. It’ll eat up your processor’s memory and take a while, but you can use the time for making a sandwich or going back and cutting and pasting Fritz’s head on the original drawing because it wouldn’t stop taunting you.

We need to make the piece look a little aged. It’s time to paste in a scan of newsprint. I played with the saturation and layer opacity a bit—both to make sure it looks faded. It’s not a bad idea to keep a library of paper textures for this kind of thing. If you’d like to download the newsprint for your own drawing, click here.

Finally, I needed a straight, but roughish border to frame the panel. I could have drawn and scanned one in, but instead I went into Illustrator (after measuring in PhotoShop with the Info palette) and drew a perfectly sized rectangle. I selected the line and applied an artistic stroke, then exported the line back into PhotoShop. Sounds like a lot of work, but believe me, it’s a lot quicker for me than trying to get that line just straight and jagged-y enough. I also scanned and pasted in a signature for the piece.

And that finished it.